“i am tremendously thankful for everything you’ve done to help — i dont think openai would have happened without you — and it really fucking hurts when you publicly attack openai,” Altman wrote to Musk, his fellow co-founder of the artificial intelligence startup. That text, now part of a legal record, captures the tangled personal history that will soon be laid bare in a federal courtroom in California.
This week, nine ordinary Californians will be asked to answer a question that has shadowed the tech industry for years: Did Sam Altman deceive Elon Musk about his intentions to turn OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise? Musk’s lawsuit accuses Altman of betraying the nonprofit mission the two men agreed upon when they founded the venture in 2015, a mission centered on developing safe artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. The trial is expected to probe grievances that stretch back to the company’s earliest days.
The case strikes at the core of a broader anxiety in the age of Big Tech: whether the people running the most powerful companies on earth can be trusted. Musk has cast the dispute in stark terms, calling Altman a “swindler” and “Scam Altman” on X, the social media platform he owns. The media buildup has been equally charged, with Bloomberg framing the proceedings as a “showdown” and Wired describing them as a “battle for OpenAI’s soul.”
Questions about Altman’s candor are not new. His trustworthiness was the subject of a 16,000-word profile in The New Yorker. In 2023, OpenAI’s own board of directors cited a lack of “candor” when it voted to remove him as chief executive, a decision it reversed days later under pressure from employees and investors. The company’s first chief scientist has publicly stated that Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying.”
Musk’s legal argument rests on his claim that his name, his time and roughly $40 million in contributions were essential to making OpenAI viable as a nonprofit. The two men co-founded the organization with a pledge to develop artificial intelligence technology that would remain open and safe, a promise Musk says Altman abandoned in pursuit of commercial gain. The jury will be tasked with determining whether that shift amounted to fraud.
A Trial With High Stakes for the Industry
The outcome of the case could have implications far beyond the personal feud between two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures. OpenAI is expected to pursue an initial public offering before the end of this year, a milestone that would value the ChatGPT maker at tens of billions of dollars. A verdict against Altman could complicate those plans and raise new questions about the governance of the company.
For now, the trial promises to pull back the curtain on one of the most consequential partnerships in modern technology. The two men who helped launch the artificial intelligence revolution will face each other not in a boardroom or on social media, but in a courtroom where a jury of their peers will decide whose version of the story is true.
