Musk v. Altman: Much ado about nothing

Today I’m talking with Liz Lopatto, who spent the last month covering the Musk v. Altman trial in all its chaos. You’ll hear her describe the courthouse as a “zoo” and explain that there were protests of one kind or another happening outside every day. Both Elon Musk and Sam Altman are big personalities, and people have a lot of feelings about both of them and the AI industry. And in the end… nothing happened! The jury found that Elon had filed his lawsuit after the statute of limitations had run out. You’ll hear Liz explain exactly what’s going on there. Beyond that, the trial was nominally about OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit entity from a nonprofit one and if the way OpenAI went about it cost Elon Musk money. But really, the suit seems mostly to have been about Elon Musk being mad at Sam Altman — or at OpenAI, for being successful without him — and wanting him punished in some way. So in a room full of untrustworthy, unreliable people all fighting with each other, did anyone even have a reputation left to lose? Is there a floor? Okay: Liz Lopatto on Musk v. Altman . Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Liz Lopatto, you are a senior chaos reporter here at The Verge . You just covered the Sam Altman v. Elon Musk trial. Welcome to Decoder . Thank you. Always a pleasure to be here. I feel like it’s always some new, relatively insane thing that we’re talking about. We have to stop meeting under these circumstances. I think these are your favorite circumstances. They are my favorite circumstances.  A few times a year, we drive you absolutely batty by sending you to cover something, and this trial was 100% one of those situations. The copy got increasingly unhinged. I think the audience liked it. But you were in the courtroom for the majority of Musk v. Altman . You got to see a bunch of the testimony live as these guys took the stand, as Mira Murati and others took the stand.  We’ll start at the high level. I think the audience probably knows that Elon Musk lost, but what was this case about and what were the vibes in the courtroom? There are two things that we should distinguish. There was what the case was ostensibly about, and then there was what the case was actually about, and those are two entirely separate things.  Ostensibly, the case was about the violation of a charitable trust.Elon Musk had donated a bunch of money to OpenAI Foundation, and then they created a for-profit, and he thinks that’s a violation of his charitable trust. He also thinks that the timing of that was right around what is known as “the blip,” when Sam Alton was briefly removed and brought back. Put a pin in that. It’s going to be important here. That’s what we’re ostensibly there for.  Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here . Not a subscriber? You can sign up here . Because it was around the blip, Microsoft was accused of aiding and abetting, and Microsoft very quickly became my favorite part of the case.  In reality, there had been so many changing legal strategies around this. This case was filed I think two years ago in state court and then withdrawn and then put in federal court. There’s just been a myriad of things that have shuffled around since then, including a charge that got dropped right before we went to court. So to me, the main point of this was punishing Sam Altman and maybe trying to kneecap OpenAI. And this is a case where the two worst people you know are fighting so it’s kind of hard to root for anyone. The most common response that I tended to get when I would talk about this to people or when I would post about it on social media was like, “Can they both go to jail?” So that’s kind of the vibe. The courtroom was a little bit of a zoo during Musk’s testimony. We had one woman who got called down in front of the courtroom by the judge and chewed out because she had been taking photos in the courthouse. On the very last day, we had a guy who was ejected because he had been recording the proceedings in the courtroom. There were some shenanigans.  Every time we would leave the courthouse, there would be some kind of protest going on, usually behind the lawyers as they were trying to give their daily summary and spin what they had done in the courtroom, and then parading behind them would be  a guy in a Cybertruck holding an “Elon Sucks” sign. Perfect. So that was what that was. I want to come to the legal issues and particularly the ruling from the jury, as there’s a lot of mechanics there. I just want to stick on a point that the goal here was for Elon Musk to punish Sam Altman, and connect that to the protests and the comments you’re getting on social media, and certainly the comments we get every time we publish anything about AI. Is there any reputation left to damage for Sam Altman or the AI industry as a whole? Because it seems like both of these guys are at all-time lows. I’m thinking about jury selection when the judge had to just say, “It seems like no one likes Elon Musk, but we’re going to have to trust that the jury will be fair.” What’s even left to take away here? There’s no floor about these things. I also view Sam Altman as untrustworthy, which is one of the things that this trial was really driving home as one of the points that Elon Musk’s lawyers were making, and I agree. I also think everybody else in the trial was totally untrustworthy. It was not just Sam Altman, it was all of them. One of the things that I found myself thinking about was that the person who really got damaged the most was Mira Murati who, at least as far as I know, didn’t have a reputation as being somebody who was untrustworthy, or conniving, or whatever. And then in testimony from former OpenAI board members, we found out that she was one of the reasons that Sam Altman got fired and then was immediately texting Sam Altman like, “Oh, no, Sam, it’s very bad. It’s very bad, Sam.” You remember during this blip that Altman was fired for a pattern of being untrustworthy or something. It was “he was not consistently candid with the board,” which could have meant anything. Anything! And the thing that I remember, because I gossip with a bunch of journalists and we are ferocious gossips, is all of us were like, “Oh, he did something illegal. Let’s find out what illegal thing he did.”  As far as I can tell, no, he didn’t. It was just that he was engaging in what I would characterize as relatively normal executive shenanigans, where you are maintaining your control of the company by pitching your subordinates against each other — a strategy that is widely used in corporate America, by the way.  So she wouldn’t tell people that she was involved in his removal. She was the interim CEO, and then publicly supported him, and then publicly was involved in bringing him back. Someone on the stand, I don’t remember who, said Mira was waiting to see which way the wind would blow and didn’t realize she was the wind. That was Helen Toner, who was one of the board members who stepped down in this debacle. Because obviously as this proceeded, it became clear that by firing Sam in the way that they had fired him, they had jeopardized the entire company. One of the things that I thought was really interesting from Sam’s testimony — that I did believe, by the way — is that he thought about just taking a job at Microsoft and getting paid and not having to deal with any headaches anymore. I can certainly imagine after having been really publicly and embarrassingly fired, and having gone through all of the annoying things that one goes through as a manager and especially as a CEO, just being like, “You know what?