From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily.
For the last three weeks, a messy, dramatic battle has played out between two of the most powerful titans of tech in the world: Elon Musk and Sam Altman. In a high-stakes lawsuit, Musk is seeking to unwind one of the leaders of the AI boom, OpenAI, and remove Altman as its chief executive. Today, as jury deliberations in the trial begin, tech reporter Mike Isaac takes us inside the courtroom drama and explains how a corporate dispute got extremely personal.
It's Monday, May 18th.
Oh my god, I'm so sorry. Can you hear me, Mike? You made it.
I'm sorry. I've been so harried. Thank you for dealing with it.
I mean, are you hanging in? It seems like it's been a long day.
I'm pretty fried, man. It's been like three weeks of 12-hour days, 5:00 a.m. mornings. It's pretty intense.
Yeah. Three weeks, no breaks, covering the Musk-Altman trial every single day. I have so many questions. Just tell us what that's been like. What have you seen?
Here we go. There's Elon.
So, it's downtown Oakland.
It's the battle of the billionaires here at the district court in Oakland. People show up at like 5 or 6:00 in the morning most days. And right from the beginning, this song is hot off the press. It's kind of like the circus is entering town.
He calls himself an altruist, but look at what he's done. His race to super AI could kill each and every one.
You have a bunch of protest groups. Do you have people who hate Sam Altman? Do you have people who hate Elon Musk?
You have people who hate everyone involved.
So again, we have trillionaires and billionaires arguing over OpenAI while hundreds of thousands of workers cannot afford to live in the region. Oh, and I forgot to mention the, um, you know, those like wavy car dealership things.
So, there's that with an 'Elon sucks' printed in big block letters on it.
There's a more intense one of Musk doing the Sieg Heil salute.
Like the arms are doing the Heil.
Yes. I don't actually know how they did the engineering to make that work, but all of which is to say it's a scene, right? I talked to one woman who is retired and was a university administrator and has just been showing up because it's fun. Everyone is showing up hoping to get into the courtroom, which is only like 30 unreserved seats. So, it's kind of like trying to get in the club, but the club is people worried about the end of the world because of AI, basically.
So, high-intensity atmosphere outside the courtroom, clearly. What about inside?
You know, we all have to go into this federal courthouse, and it's a pretty intimate hallway that leads to the courtroom. And then on the other side is like a holding pen where they keep all the like billionaires that don't want to be around people like me all day, and they have to essentially walk past us to get into the courtroom. So every day on the way in, you have Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, one of the other co-founders of OpenAI, all the sort of like bigwigs of AI kind of coming down to earth and dealing with the press and the public and their fans and their detractors. But it's more than that. It's this moment where the stakes are pretty big here.
Yeah, it's Musk levying this lawsuit, which has been years now in the making. He's saying that with this project that he got involved with with OpenAI so many years ago, he was duped essentially from creating what he thought would be a nonprofit to build artificial intelligence for the good of mankind. And instead, what Elon Musk says is that he was tricked by his co-founders, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, who decided they wanted to make it a for-profit company once they had stars and dollar signs in their eyes. And I think it's, you know, there's a lot of lawsuits that fly around Silicon Valley, but this one could really damage OpenAI, what is now almost a trillion-dollar private company.
So Musk is asking for a lot. For one, he wants 150 billion with a B dollars in damages, but he's saying not for me. Of course, it's to be returned to the nonprofit organization, which is like the parent of OpenAI, the for-profit company. So, it's like this quote-unquote selfless moment that he's trying to do. Musk is also asking for them to unwind this for-profit structure that they've devised and basically turn OpenAI back into exclusively a nonprofit. And finally, we have, I guess, what would be the coup de grace for management, which is to basically remove Sam Altman and Greg Brockman from the top of the company and the board of directors, and that's a big deal. So, it's a lot.
Mike, I think it's going to be news to people that OpenAI even has a nonprofit company attached to it. So, I want you to kind of go back to the beginning, which seems like is at the heart of this case.
Yes. Rewind to 2015. We have this moment of Elon Musk sitting down with Larry Page, chief executive of Google, and having basically a big disagreement over the future of what AI should look like. Musk says, 'I'm very worried.' Apparently, he's been talking at parties forever how he's very concerned about the future of AI and it harming humanity. Larry Page says, 'Whatever, it's fine.' And you know, the way that AI will progress, even if it's not for the good of mankind, it's still going to be okay because AI will survive past us. Musk is shocked and aghast by that and saying, you know, 'You don't care about humanity.' Page calls him a speciesist, which is a funny new-to-me word.
100%. Saying, you know, like he's being discriminatory against an artificial intelligence robot. And Elon's like, 'I got to do something about Google.' Goes and starts talking with Sam Altman, who then was running a startup incubator in Silicon Valley, and saying, 'This is existential stuff. We need to worry about what AI could do for the future.' Thus, OpenAI was born. And the idea was we should be the ones building the future of artificial intelligence, but we need to do it safely and build it in an altruistic manner, let's say. And Elon Musk was the money man, right? He had made a ton of money on PayPal. He was building Tesla and doing really well. He had SpaceX, and you know, this feels long ago, but his star was also pretty high. And it was mostly seeing him as like Iron Man slash boy wonder inventions guy and, you know, the entrepreneur that everyone loved. So he was the one that was like, 'Okay, I'm gonna fund this thing. That's a money-losing endeavor, but that's the point because we're doing this for the good of mankind, basically.' And from the beginning, everyone involved, including Musk, Altman, they agree AI is this incredibly important technology and that it's really critical that they be in charge of it as an altruistic endeavor. So that in their minds, the good guys are the stewards of this ultra-powerful thing that's coming. And the thought is Altman is going to build it and Musk is going to fund it.
Yeah, that's right. And you know, the funny thing going on in this trial, too, is just sort of seeing a window into how they were talking about it over email at the time. And like this was when no one cared about AI and it was kind of a fringe pursuit, and they were all talking about it like the far-flung universe in which AI was going to take over the world. They were serious about it. It's interesting because we hear so much of that now, these numerous kind of concerns about AI, but you're saying privately amongst each other they were voicing that early on.
Yeah, totally. I mean, I've been out here in the Valley for like 16, 17 years and pretty cynical, and usually when I hear these sort of grand proclamations about worrying about humanity, I'm just like, 'Okay, all right.' But like they've been talking about this for a long time in the same way and weren't performing on an email chain of three people.
Okay. So these guys join forces. They're aligned on mission. What happens next?
Yeah. So Musk, who, by the way, is running multiple companies, is kind of a figure in the background who is paying the rent. He's got the checks coming in funding this thing while Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are trying to do the work of building the next-generation AI models. Right? We get to around 2017, 2018. Greg and Sam start talking about if we need to develop these models the way we want to, we are going to need a heck of a lot more money, and maybe like in the millions, tens of millions, billions even, like long before the insane sums we know we're spending now. But they start saying this not-for-profit model, the way we have it structured, may not work entirely.
They're basically realizing this is going to be super resource-intensive and a nonprofit isn't going to get us where we need to be to build the thing we need to build.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And so what we started seeing come out in the trial is emails between Sam Altman and Greg Brockman trying to figure out just exactly how they could change this nonprofit structure into something that could help them get the money they needed.
So there's this sort of like interesting cold war battle brewing between Sam and Elon and other folks involved. They're exchanging these increasingly terse and tense emails with one another, and Musk is worried that he's essentially losing his grasp on this nonprofit company. And so he has this idea of moving OpenAI inside of Tesla to say, 'Hey, we can incubate it in here. This is where we can build AI.' Altman bucks at that idea, and things basically fall apart. And so at that point, Elon says, 'Look, I'm out. Go with God. Good luck. I'm doing my own thing.'
Wow. He's out. He cuts bait over this.
That's right. He's just like tired of it. And you have to understand, too, AI development at the time was not what it is now. It wasn't like him saying, 'I don't care about the hottest technology ever.' Or like this thing was costing him money and it was making him frustrated, and he was arguing with them on a thing that he didn't know if it would ever work.
Right. And for OpenAI, does that mean that the Elon money spigot then turns off practically? What's the consequence for them?
I mean, it's funny. He actually does continue to pay rent on their offices for a few more months, which is nice of him, I guess. But Sam and Greg start talking to Microsoft, the king of software from forever. They've been doing a bunch of AI spending for a long time. They realize that Google is very far ahead of them in AI. And so Microsoft's Satya Nadella, the CEO, says, 'Hey, do we need to get on this AI train? Should we be funding this research in OpenAI?' That's sort of the deal they start arranging. And you know, Sam and Greg negotiate this thing where Microsoft will now be the backer of incubating AI research inside of OpenAI. And Microsoft promises OpenAI a billion dollars. And it's important there because the amount of money that Elon Musk spent on this was 38 million dollars, which...
Yeah, it's more than I've made.
Right. But in the grand scheme of things...
In the grand scheme of things, it's nothing compared to how much Microsoft and others would eventually put into this.
Okay. So the split at this point doesn't sound that acrimonious. Like it doesn't sound that bitter if he's still paying the rent. It's just kind of like, okay, we agree to part ways.
So then how does it get to the point where Musk is now suing them for 150 billion?
OpenAI almost unceremoniously releases ChatGPT in 2022, their chatbot that they didn't really think was a big deal at the time, but they put it out in the world. And then the thing goes crazy. Like it literally becomes the most downloaded app of all time overnight. It also wakes up every big company in the Valley saying, 'Okay, time to invest enormous amounts of money in this.' And Microsoft decides to really step it up and invest 10 billion dollars in OpenAI.
Which is a lot of money. The one person who doesn't like this when they hear about it is Elon Musk.
