The email that can sink Musk's case against OpenAI

The trial of Musk vs Altman entered its second week with a live audio stream now available through the US District Court Northern District of California's YouTube channel, giving the public direct access to a case that could determine the future of OpenAI and its flagship product, ChatGPT.

Proceedings run generally between 11am and 5pm ET on court days.

What is Musk claiming?

Musk founded OpenAI together with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2015 based on the idea that artificial general intelligence should serve mankind and not just profit its shareholders. 

The 2024 lawsuit filed by Elon Musk claims that Altman and Brockman have betrayed the initial idea behind OpenAI when the organisation has been transformed into a capped-profit entity estimated at $157 billion.

Musk demands the resignation of Altman and Brockman, the cancellation of OpenAI's public benefit corporation status, and $150 billion of compensation intended for the original non-profit.

However, the most detrimental information so far has not been presented by the lawyers of OpenAI rather, by Musk himself. The September 2017 email obtained as a part of a trial has shown that Musk was threatening to quit OpenAI and stated that he was no longer willing to "provide free funding" in case of negotiation about equity and titles rather than fulfilling the mission.

Shockingly, an internal email from December 2016 has been leaked where Musk tells his Neuralink employees that setting up OpenAI as a non-profit "might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move", citing issues of urgency and competition from Google DeepMind.

The judge and the other side's lawyer have focused on one key issue, which is that if it was so important to Musk that the organisation be a non-profit, why then did he go ahead and form xAI as a for-profit organisation?

When Musk answered that he had already formed a nonprofit, he received the quick retort that the nonprofit status no longer applied. For its part, OpenAI has labelled the lawsuit a "a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor," and said that this case was a smoke screen to hide Musk’s AI project, Grok.

The trial is expected to continue for several more weeks.