In the battle over who will be Silicon Valley’s most obscenely wealthy and apocalyptic tech billionaire, who’s making our waking lives hell on a second-by-second basis, Sam Altman has won this round. Per NPR, after less than two hours of jury deliberation, a California judge decided that Elon Musk’s suit against Altman over the OpenAI CEO’s decision to shift the company from non-profit to for-profit was filed outside the statute of limitations. The suit stems from Musk’s exit from OpenAI in 2018, which was so long ago that Musk has already entered the AI space with an even more irresponsible for-profit model, Grok, the one that called itself “MechaHitler” upon launch and allows users to make child sexual abuse material and non-consensual revenge porn. So, even the premise of the lawsuit, that Musk was in any way annoyed that Sam Altman wasn’t making an ethically sound product that wouldn’t destroy the world, is pretty flimsy. Nevertheless, a nine-member advisory jury decided it’s too late, Mr. Musk.
“Regarding the OpenAI case, the judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality,” Musk later tweeted (via Deadline). “There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity. The only question is WHEN they did it! I will be filing an appeal with the Ninth Circuit, because creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America. OpenAI was founded to benefit all of humanity.” He continued unleashing his inner Trump by following it up with a response to a follower: “This illustrates why the ruling by the terrible activist Oakland judge, who simply used the jury as a fig leaf, creates such a terrible precedent. She just handed out a free license to loot charities if you can keep the looting quiet for a few years!”
Musk, one of OpenAI’s founders, helped finance the start-up in 2015, assigning Altman the task of building a “responsible AI” that, presumably, wouldn’t help school shooters commit atrocities. A few years later, OpenAI decided that, actually, they would need to do some for-profit work. Musk left in 2018, and at the time, his exit was reported as a “conflict of interest” with Tesla. However, during testimony, Altman claimed that Musk wanted to take control of the company. Building on his flimsy motivations, Musk spent a week in court embarrassing himself by talking about AI’s potential “Terminator outcome” so much that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez had to tell him, “They got it. That’s enough.” He was just trying to stop the Terminator outcome, which, “in the movie, it’s not a good situation.” With inane movie opinions still rattling through his brain, filing them away for future variations on the unfortunately ever-present Torment Nexus tweet, Musk retreated to his usual security blankie: his personal website, X, the Everything App, where he complained about the genetic makeup of fictional women he believes to have been real when he wasn’t posting defenses of Elon Musk from his mother’s account.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.