Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
Three were Tesla AI. One was OpenAI as a B-corp subsidiary of Tesla. One was Altman as anchor for TeslaAI. But my favorite? “Find a way to get Demis. Seriously…. Demis really does fanboy hard and I don’t think he’s immoral… just amoral. If he hung around E perhaps it would force him to think about humanity more.” Hassabis is really haunting these guys.
as part of his push to increase Tesla’s AI presence. “Those who want to work on large scale AI research don’t currently think of Tesla, and Elon wants to change that by announcing his intention to create a world-class AI lab,” Zilis wrote in 2017.
We are seeing more details about Zilis advocating for Musk’s plan to wrap OpenAI into Tesla. “Tesla solves the funding issue immediately… Tesla at least has option to bury,” reads one email from Zilis. “They haven’t internalized the advantages to burying this in Tesla for stealth advantage,” reads another.
They didn’t want Musk — or anyone — to have control over OpenAI. “You and I can argue that’s stupid all we want but they are holding firm on it,” Zilis says in an email to Jared Birchall in September 2017.
That’s what I’ve learned from his emails. Me too, Sam!
A separate ideation email to Altman lays out certain options for changes to OpenAI’s structure, including one option of rolling all of OpenAI into a B-corp, or a for-profit company with a public mission, and another option of having both an OpenAI C-corp and a nonprofit.
Zilis’ answers on the stand are often slightly different from the ones she gave in her deposition. We’ve now had two videos played in the courtroom. She’s also being represented by Musk’s lawyers.
The message, according to exhibits read aloud in court proceedings, said, “I just wanted to say I hope you are [OK]. I have no idea what’s going on but … I care about you as a person first and foremost. Sending all of my positive vibes your way.”
Altman and Brockman were both investors in the nuclear energy company, and since the company didn’t have an official product yet, she said that OpenAI potentially entering into a deal with Helion “felt super out of left field … How is it the case that we want to place [a] major bet on a speculative technology?”
under better light, Zilis’ top is green and not gray.
First, she says that the broad release of ChatGPT wasn’t discussed with the non-profit OpenAI board. This was discussed in a board meeting. Second, the deal with Helion raised eyebrows because Altman and Brockman both had investments and the tech was still speculative. She also felt that “it was probably the only time where I remember feeling in the pit of my stomach -- just being like, I voiced my concerns.”
She said she and the “entire board had voiced extreme concern about that whole massive thing happening without any semblance of board communication.” That was the first concern she raised internally about Altman, she said.
Shivon Zilis recalled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying of OpenAI at the time that Microsoft was “below them, above them, around them.” Zilis said this denoted complete control, calling it “terrifying because [it] was just not the thing that we had been fighting so hard for.”
She also said she was concerned about board members who voted for Altman’s ouster being “expelled.” But “more concerning than anything else,” Zilis said, was the idea that to her, the firm hired by OpenAI to investigate did not share what really happened with the public.
She said he goes into “maniac mode” and had trouble thinking of a more quantifiable amount of hours. She added, as an answer to a follow-up question, that their time spent together was a brief break from “the insanity … that is his entire work life.”
She is wearing a black cardigan and black pants with a gray shirt. She is saying that after graduating from Yale, she took a job at IBM, then joined Bloomberg Ventures, and launched Bloomberg Beta, where she focused on AI investments. “I was 13 years old and I read a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil,” and that opened a new world for her. “I read it 10–15 times.”
Sam Altman wasn’t making decisions quickly enough and dragging things out, or not making decisions on controversial things at all, Murati says. He told people what they wanted to hear. “Those are the big themes.”
Satya Nadella met with the OpenAI board. And Murati told Microsoft’s Kevin Scott about Ilya Sutskever signing a petition to reinstate Altman. Murati also wanted Altman back. “The board had not followed a process that could be trusted and it wasn’t transparent with regard to firing Sam.”
It is specifically about how OpenAI and Microsoft worked together. She says that when GPT models were developed, there was no sense they would be commercializable. She also says that Altman undermined her in her ability to do her job, and pitted executives at OpenAI against each other.
Closing statements are likely next Thursday, not early next week. Also, Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo suggested that OpenAI came up with “small adjunct” as a phrase while cross-examining Brockman. In fact, Musk used that phrase.
YGR has sternly warned the lawyers about how much time they have left. We expect closing arguments a week from tomorrow.
The two companies’ famed 2019 contract was made public as part of the Musk v. Altman trial exhibits. The 36-page agreement defines artificial general intelligence as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”
Pornhub went dark in the UK in January after the country began mandating age checks for sites hosting content deemed “harmful” to kids. But now that Apple’s doing the verifying in iOS 26.4, Pornhub parent company Aylo announced that UK users who verify their age with their iPhone can now access the adult website.
As reported by The Salt Lake Tribune, the planned hyperscale data center in Box Elder County, when fully completed, is expected to use 9 gigawatts of power — more than double the 4 gigawatts of power used by the state right now. The project is backed in part by Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary.
Every three months, we get another round of financial updates from publicly traded companies like Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon, but the Trump Administration is pushing to lower that requirement to every six months. The argument in favor of changing it claims that quarterly reporting is a burden on small or medium-sized companies, despite the risks of weaker monitoring, as Reuters and WSJ report.
Wu is still identifying documents. Two jurors have some real thousand-yard stares going on.
We are now looking at assorted legal documents with him. We have determined the board has approved the agreement of 2018, which is the initial formation of the for-profit OpenAI LP. OpenAI Inc. contributed assets and in result got the limited partner interest and “residual interest.” This seems to be mostly about reading stuff into the record.
Molo asked a very narrow question about texts or emails about removing Musk from the board. Then he accused Brockman of making up the explanation after the fact because of the trial. OpenAI’s lawyer pulled out two sentences from the same entry: “real decision is fire Elon” and “We seem converged on the ‘fire Elon’ route.” Pretty good from OpenAI’s lawyers, and very annoying / misleading from Molo.
For instance, yesterday, Brockman gave a long spiel about the setup of OpenAI that only tangentially involved Musk. Altman and Sutskever were portrayed as being in the middle of things. Molo effectively said that and then pointed out that Musk’s money was key. Brockman objected both to the summary, and to the idea that Musk’s money was key. Come on, dude. We aren’t idiots.
It’s not clear to me why Musk’s ultimatum matters? Musk says he won’t continue funding until he gets a firm commitment. Brockman testified he never made that firm commitment, and Musk didn’t resume his quarterly payments. There were clear continuing negotiations about how to raise money, including whether Tesla should get control of OpenAI and whether there should be an ICO after this email. What are we doing? I am at this point genuinely lost.
We have been talking about whether or not Greg Brockman made an initial investment into the for-profit. If we all agree that the for-profit has a different investment base than the nonprofit, I don’t get what the conflict here is? The nonprofit is effectively an investor in the for-profit, though the investment was in kind. The nonprofit still exists. Right now I am trying to figure out whether I find Brockman or Musk more reliable, and I think the answer is, it’s going to depend on who is most supported by other witnesses and documents.
The problem is that the chronology of Brockman’s negotiations with Musk is now working against him. We have multiple emails and texts with Musk proposing that he be in charge, followed by Musk withholding funding unless Brockman and Ilya Sutskever did what he wanted. Brockman might be motivated by profit — I certainly think so! — but Musk’s actions are what they are: high-pressure negotiating tactics that failed. It seems to me that Musk’s lack of involvement with OpenAI’s for-profit is self-inflicted.
“Did you practice them?” Molo is really not into the various ways that Brockman is objecting to the wording of his questions. I’m not sure how sympathetic the jury is to either of them. They seem pretty stone-faced.
Brockman is being really squishy about this — I mean, he did say that he thought Musk was going to hit him at one point. Molo is I think trying to make the point that Musk was being “hardheaded” in negotiations. He’s also saying that Brockman wasn’t familiar with corporate governance. And he is, notably, raising his voice at Brockman.
Greg the Bard, who told long-winded stories about how wonderful OpenAI is, is gone. “False assumption baked into the question” is the go-to currently.
Musk’s lawyer, Molo, is saying that first of all, Brockman actually did the layoffs, and second of all, a memo prepared by Ilya Sutskever contained criticism of Brockman as a manager. Shortly after the memo was prepared, Brockman was removed from the board.
Microsoft is low-key my favorite part of this trial? Their opening statement was just like, an ad for Microsoft products. Almost all questions, including of Brockman, are like, “Did Microsoft play a role in the founding? Did it participate in the creation of a for-profit entity?” (No, obviously.) It is so funny, like they are going to at any moment turn to the jury and say, “Now why are we in this?”
Brockman says he was told he was removed from the board in an eight-minute call, and not given a reason why. He was also told Sam Altman was fired. Shortly after, he quit. “The board’s actions felt wrong to me. Wrongly conceived, wrongly executed.” He thought that he’d start a new AI company with Sam Altman. Several other people quit alongside Brockman and they started planning their new company. Satya Nadella called to ask if something terrible had happened, and Brockman said no. So then being a startup within Microsoft was an option too. But ultimately, as we all know, Brockman went back to OpenAI.
She did not disclose her romantic relationship with Musk to Greg Brockman. She gave birth to twins while still a board member at OpenAI, and found out their father was Elon Musk through “public reporting.” She did, eventually, say the twins were via IVF and her relationship with Musk was “entirely platonic.” She stayed on the board because Sutskever, Altman, and Brockman trusted her — other board members wanted her gone.
