Natalie Kitroeff: From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is the Daily. For the last 3 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 oust 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.

Mike Isaac: Oh my god, I'm so sorry. Can you hear me?

Natalie Kitroeff: Mike? You made it.

Mike Isaac: I'm sorry. I've been so harried. Thank you for dealing with it.

Natalie Kitroeff: I mean, are you hanging in? It seems like it's been a long day.

Mike Isaac: I'm pretty fried, man. It's been like three weeks of 12-hour days, 5:00 a.m. mornings. It's pretty intense.

Natalie Kitroeff: 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?

Mike Isaac: Here we go. There's Elon. So, it's downtown Oakland. It's the battle of the billionaires here at the District Court. People show up at like 5 or 6:00 in the morning most days. And right from the beginning, it's kind of like the circus is entering town.

Natalie Kitroeff: I hear singing.

Mike Isaac: Yes. 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, you know those like wavy car dealership things?

Natalie Kitroeff: Sure. Iconic.

Mike Isaac: 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. 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 into the club, but the club is people worried about the end of the world because of AI basically.

Natalie Kitroeff: So, high-intensity atmosphere outside the courtroom clearly. What about inside?

Mike Isaac: 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 big wigs 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.

Natalie Kitroeff: Talk about that.

Mike Isaac: Yeah, it's Musk leveling 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.

Natalie Kitroeff: Say why.

Mike Isaac: 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 "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 grâce 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.

Natalie Kitroeff: 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.

Mike Isaac: 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.

Natalie Kitroeff: Not a term I've heard.

Mike Isaac: 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. 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 there was 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."

Natalie Kitroeff: 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.

Mike Isaac: 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 dumerous kind of concerns about AI, but you're saying privately amongst each other they were voicing that early on.

Natalie Kitroeff: Okay. So these guys join forces. They're aligned on mission. What happens next?

Mike Isaac: 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. 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 they start saying this nonprofit model may not work entirely.

Natalie Kitroeff: 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.

Mike Isaac: 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."

Natalie Kitroeff: Wow. He's out. He cuts bait over this.

Mike Isaac: 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. 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.

Natalie Kitroeff: And for OpenAI, does that mean that the Elon money spigot then turns off practically? What's the consequence for them?

Mike Isaac: 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 realize that Google is very far ahead of them in AI. And so Microsoft Satcha Nadella the CEO says, "Hey, should we be funding this research in OpenAI?" 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, which in the grand scheme of things is nothing compared to how much Microsoft and others would eventually put into this.

Natalie Kitroeff: So then how does it get to the point where Musk is now suing them for 150 billion?

Mike Isaac: OpenAI almost unceremoniously releases ChatGPT in 2022. And then the thing goes crazy. It literally becomes the most downloaded app of all time overnight. And Microsoft decides to really step it up and invest $10 billion in OpenAI. The one person who doesn't like this is Elon Musk. He fires off this message to Sam Altman just being like, "Dude, what are you doing? This feels like a bait and switch."

Natalie Kitroeff: Mike, you're telling us this whole trial hinges on how credible members of the jury find these two tech titans. Let's start with Musk.

Mike Isaac: There was actually some difficulty in finding a jury that wasn't biased against Musk because of his recent political activities. They tried to paint him as this serial entrepreneur dreamer guy who just wants to do things that are good for the world and good for humanity. He deliver these testimonies face the jury. Elon Musk, telling you that he cares about humanity, he cares about you, the jurors, and is doing this for you. I think it was probably smart.

Natalie Kitroeff: And what was he like on the stand?

Mike Isaac: Musk has like all these interesting mannerisms. He tends to mutter and ramble, but in an occasionally self-effacing and even charming way. He talks about these big grand things as an engineer would be saying something. Fundamentally Musk's argument in the case is that Altman deceived him. There was a very clear line: they're trying to steal a charity, and if you allow OpenAI to get away with this, no charity will ever be safe in the future.

Mike Isaac: But I think the most memorable part was upon cross-examination. That's when Elon Musk, the fighter, let the fireworks out essentially. The humble entrepreneurial Musk from before starts melting away and we get Musk the pugilist. He starts getting snippy. The idea was that this is about Musk being mad that he's not in control. He's being left behind and now he's throwing a tantrum.

Natalie Kitroeff: Okay. What about Sam Altman? What was the Altman show?

Mike Isaac: He's more soft-spoken. He was leaning into this sort of like I'm an entrepreneur who cares about the world. This is where things get super gnarly for Altman. There has been piece after piece of the image of Sam Altman being chipped away in public. The reason he was fired was because he was "not consistently candid". There's a particularly damning article in the New Yorker basically painting him as just a fundamentally untrustworthy person.

Mike Isaac: Literally the first question out of Elon Musk's council's mouth was, "Are you trustworthy?" Just like a bucket of cold water in his face right off of the bat. It was very much just a parade of here are all the ways we think you're a bald-faced liar. After like hour one of getting called, you know, Satan, he decided to start pushing back a little bit more.

Natalie Kitroeff: It's interesting how personal this all sounds. It's ostensibly about whether this company that was a nonprofit betrayed its original mission, but at a really fundamental sense, it seems to be about who these people are at their core.

Mike Isaac: Yeah, totally. A lot of this trial feels kind of vibes based. Whoever wins this case, there is something lost for both sides there because it's just a lot of real ugliness being dredged up for the public to see and judge for themselves.

Mike Isaac: You have Molotov cocktails being thrown at Sam Altman's house. The stakes are not just I'm going to have the next cool company. It's what happens to the human race if we fail. There's not really any coming back from how high stakes things are. That's just how it is out here now.