Musk v. Altman Trial Wraps: Jackass Trophy, $200B Valuations, and Dueling Narratives

The Musk v. Altman jury trial reached its final day of testimony after three weeks of explosive revelations about Silicon Valley's most powerful figures. Closing arguments are set for Thursday morning, with jury deliberations to follow. At its core, Elon Musk has accused Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of looting the nonprofit AI charity they co-founded in 2015, while OpenAI counters that Musk departed in 2018 after failing to seize control of the company and is now acting out of jealousy.

The day's most memorable moment came from OpenAI chief futurist Joshua Achiam, who recounted a tense all-hands meeting in 2018 where Musk announced he was leaving to build his own AI — and fast — because he feared the wrong people might get there first. When Achiam challenged Musk's approach as unsafe and reckless, Musk called him a jackass. Colleagues Dario Amodei and David Luan later gifted Achiam a small golden jackass trophy inscribed with 'never stop being a jackass for safety.' OpenAI's lawyers attempted to introduce the trophy as evidence, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected it, keeping it from the jury's view.

The financial stakes of the trial crystallized around OpenAI's $13 billion partnership with Microsoft. Musk's expert had previously argued the deal harmed the nonprofit's mission, but OpenAI's expert John Coates turned that testimony against itself — pointing to Musk's own expert's pie chart as evidence the partnership generated roughly $200 billion in value for the nonprofit. 'If that's not faring well, I don't know what faring well is,' Coates told the jury.

A notable point for Musk came from Microsoft's own Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, who read aloud a 2018 email in which he questioned whether major OpenAI donors — specifically naming LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman — were aware that their seed money might be used to 'go build a for-profit thing.' Scott walked back the significance of the email, saying he had only vague awareness of OpenAI's plans at the time and wasn't thinking about Musk when he wrote it. OpenAI's legal team also played videotaped depositions from former executives, including Tasha McCauley and Mira Murati, both of whom described the Microsoft partnership as consistent with OpenAI's mission — recontextualizing testimony that Musk's team had previously used to paint a damaging picture of Altman's leadership.