Joe Rogan accidentally asked a hard question! He noted that Andreessen has said that the people who are running AI haven’t done a good job explaining AI’s benefits. He asks Andreessen to do it. Andreessen’s pitch appears to be “thinking is too hard.” Well, increasingly, I do believe thinking is too hard… for Andreessen. The rest of us — you know, normal people — are thinking just fine.
I assume because he was recording, since the marshal said, “Give me your phone.” There have been several incidents of people attempting to record or take pictures throughout the trial — but I honestly am not sure why you’d record today of all days.
Unfortunately he does not have a lot of details YGR is asking for. He doesn’t know how many investments Musk has made (11 to date, according to Pitchbook), or how many were successful. He’s getting some pretty tough questioning from YGR in the direct exam. Among the things she’d asked, he didn’t know how many startups fail in Silicon Valley, or the success rate for assorted VC firms.
The trial felt less like the fate of OpenAI and more like a window into petty grievances.
God bless. We are in the Microsoft closing statements. “Microsoft never found a single page of a single document” that referenced Musk’s alleged restrictions on his donations during the due diligence process.
You may remember that yesterday I was completely tickled by the possibility that the jury might get to see this. Even YGR seemed tickled by it. Unfortunately, she ruled that discussing it was fine but unless the Musk team gave them reason to introduce it, the jurors wouldn’t see so much as a photo. But this is the trophy Josh Achiam got for getting yelled at by Elon Musk.
There’s one more thing that Savitt is harping on. “Has the OpenAI nonprofit respected its general founding principles?” The question doesn’t matter, legally, since Musk didn’t create a charitable trust, but Savitt is going to spend some time on this because Molo emphasized it.
Musk doesn’t want to admit that trying to build an AGI lab in Tesla was a failure — whether that was by acquiring OpenAI or trying to poach all its talent, maybe even putting Altman on the board. Eddy suggests this case is revenge on OpenAI for succeeding.
That’s kind of where I’ve landed! The idea of the “adjunct” for-profit (Eddy says this is a moving target, and though Musk used it twice in testimony, when Savitt used it, Molo objected and accused him of making up a term) doesn’t show up in any of the brainstorming structure documents. We do see parallel for-profits, and the idea of a conversion to a for-profit and shutting down the nonprofit. Jared Birchall also testified that he filed to register a company for this.
