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Yesterday in a federal courthouse in Oakland, the trial of the century, Musk versus Altman, began its closing arguments. And so far, this trial has felt like a Silicon Valley episode written by someone on bath salts. The richest and sexiest man alive, Elon Musk, is currently suing a poor gay man, Sam Altman, and his friends at OpenAI and Microsoft for $134 billion. Elon says they stole an open-source charity and turned it into a closed-source money printer. While Altman says he owns no OpenAI equity and is just doing this because he loves it. I'm doing this cuz I love it. The supporting cast includes Greg Brockman, who somehow owns $30 billion of the thing Sam doesn't own. Ilya Sutskever, the vibes-based AI safety priest. Mira Murati, Sam's Brutus. And Saadia
Natella, the only adult in the room. And every single one of them has their texts, emails, and private diary entries entered into evidence. In today's video, we'll break down all the absurdities discovered throughout this lawsuit and find out who's going to win, probably. It is May 15th, 2026, and you're watching The Code Report. The Musk versus Altman lawsuit was filed 2 years ago in 2024, but the drama goes back over a decade. In 2015, Elon, Sam, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever founded OpenAI as a nonprofit to save humanity from evil. Elon donated $38 million, then tried to take it over, lost, rage quit the board in 2018, and started xAI.
Meanwhile, OpenAI pulled this trick where they bolted a for-profit subsidiary onto the nonprofit, it cashed a $13 billion check from Microsoft, and is now approaching a valuation of nearly $1 trillion. In 2024, Musk couldn't take it anymore. I just can't do it. I can't take this no more, man. His claim is that Altman and Brockman stole a charity, breached a charitable trust, and Microsoft aided and abetted them. What he wants in return is a disgorgement of up to $134 billion, and plus they need to unwind the for-profit conversion and remove Altman and Brockman. But now here's the fun part. This trial's discovery has basically been a giant group chat leak between all these executives. In exhibit A, we have emails between Sam and Elon where we find out
that OpenAI was almost called something entirely different. Elon wanted to call it Freethink and Sam wanted to call it Axon. But in hindsight, the best name for it would have been ClosedAI. In exhibit B from 2017, OpenAI's tech had just beat the best humans on Earth at Dota 2. Elon got a mega huge boner and emailed the team that it's time to take the next step for OpenAI, which translated into converting it from non-profit to for-profit with Elon as CEO and as the majority shareholder. But the craziest part is the meeting location. Quote, "The haunted mansion I just bought near San Francisco."
According to Brockman's testimony under oath, the house was still littered with confetti and red solo cups from a party the night before and Amber Heard was there serving whiskey. And just a few weeks earlier, Elon had gifted each co-founder a brand new Tesla Model 3. But all this buttering up didn't work and eventually the other co-founders proposed equal equity. Ilya Sutskever had even commissioned a painting of a Tesla to give to Musk as a peace offering. But according to Brockman, their proposal made Elon furious. He quote, "stood up and stormed around the table. I thought he was going to hit me. He grabbed the painting and started to storm out of the room. And then he turned around and said, 'When will you
be departing from OpenAI?'" Six months later, he would stop making donations and leave the OpenAI board. Now, in the years that followed between 2019 and 2021, Microsoft entered with a $1 billion investment. Even though CEO Nadella was pretty skeptical of the actual value of this investment. Eventually he would double down though and in 2022 said he didn't want Microsoft to become the next IBM while OpenAI became the next Microsoft. But then around this time, we get another crazy character popping up, Shivon Zilis. And she's the mother of four of Elon's 14 children and used to be on the OpenAI board and kept Elon up to date on what was going on there, which became a big conflict of interest when he launched xAI. But this next exhibit is
perhaps the most complex and In November 2023, Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI for 4 days before a pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor. Ilya wrote a memo accusing him of a consistent pattern of lying and pitting his execs against each other. Meanwhile, Mira Murati snaked him from the inside. At the height of the chaos, Altman texted Mira, "Can you indicate directionally, good or bad?" Her reply is now immortal, "Directionally, very bad." Altman was fired and Mira took his place temporarily. But, Sam Altman was then reinstated a few days later after receiving a ton of support from OpenAI employees and other powerful people. As Satya Nadella, watching $13 billion of Microsoft's money swing in the wind,
described the entire situation as, quote, "A sort of amateur city as far as I'm concerned." And that brings us to yesterday, the closing arguments of the trial. Elon himself wasn't there because he was on Air Force One flying to Beijing with Trump, but his lawyer focused on Altman's lack of trustworthiness and how he's been able to enrich himself through various deals in other companies he owns that are connected to OpenAI. But, on the flip side, OpenAI's lawyers claimed Elon is a guy who never cared about the nonprofit structure and only cared about winning. And he seems to have selective amnesia about his past dealings with the OpenAI founders. Basically, both sides are terrible, but who's actually going to
win? Polymarket is giving Elon a 32% chance of winning, but I think it's even lower than that. The jury in this case is advisory, so that means it ultimately comes down to this judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. And I can tell just by looking at her that she's not going to like Elon. Her husband worked for the Obama administration, so this was over before it even started. But, even if Hulk Hogan was the judge, Elon's case is still pretty weak. What they've done to OpenAI is messed up, but here's the problem. Elon himself tried to make OpenAI for profit back in 2017. There was also never a hard contract that OpenAI would stay nonprofit forever. And even worse, he admitted under oath that
xAI and Grok did steal OpenAI models, and that makes this whole lawsuit feel like it's trying to a competitor as opposed to rescuing a charity. No matter what happens though, the one thing you need to know about is Kernel, the sponsor of today's video. They provide open-source infrastructure that lets your AI agents access the internet blazingly fast thanks to GPU acceleration. It's able to spin up sandbox Chromium browsers in the cloud in under 30 milliseconds, which is fast enough to unlock more advanced use cases for your agents like interacting with WebGL heavy websites and automating complex user workflows. The faster agents also means you'll use fewer tokens and they cost a lot less money to
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