We’ll have to wait for the jury to reach a conclusion on the arguments they heard during the case to see who actually wins, but the court of public opinion is certainly capable of reaching its own conclusions. In this regard, there are very few winners coming out of this test – just a bunch of people who look like a combination of petty, greedy, vindictive, and controlling.
Since there is no real winner here, how about a power ranking to see who lost the least?
Mira Murati
Meira Murati did not physically present herself during the trial, but she appeared repeatedly during the proceedings. The former CTO of OpenAI and current CEO of Thinking Machines Lab was featured prominently in the recounting of the drama surrounding Sam Altman’s very brief ouster at OpenAI, when the board voted to remove him. Among other things, she gave us an all-timer of the “You’re fired” text, in which she told Altman that the board meeting was “apparently very bad” for her.
Muratti also appeared before the jury via a videotaped statement, in which he did not express much confidence that Altman was a bankable actor. She stated candidly in her testimony that she did not believe Altman was being completely truthful with her and that he had caused so much chaos in the company that she feared the operation was “at catastrophic risk of breaking up.” This isn’t really what you want to hear from the guy who’s still in charge of a company with a nearly $1 trillion valuation.
Sam Altman
While he was regularly portrayed as untrustworthy, Altman benefited slightly from the fact that many people did not trust him in the first place. Can you afford reputational damage when your reputation is confirmed by everyone’s testimony?
That doesn’t mean the whole experience won’t raise more questions about Altman’s leadership. If anything, it probably appears that OpenAI’s board was right to remove him and acted very quickly before everyone became suspicious.
According to The Guardian, in addition to Murati saying Altman was not truthful, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner said there was “a pattern of behavior concerning his honesty and candor”, which led her to vote to remove him. Another former board member, Natasha McCauley, said he caused “repeated crisis incidents” at the company. And former OpenAI founder Ilya Sutskever confirmed that he believed Altman “has shown a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his executives, and pitting his executives against each other.”
Even if Altman wins the case, the fallout could result in questions about his leadership.
Elon Musk
You can put Musk in the same category as Altman, because he didn’t lose that much because his reputation preceded him. Yes, he seemed like a greedy, power-hungry control freak, but this was a test of his brand.
The thing with Musk is that he probably did more damage to his reputation than anyone else, and it’s not like many people had nice things to say about him during the trial. Musk reportedly became irritable repeatedly during cross-examination. While on the stand he weakened some of his public claims about his companies, tried and failed to establish himself as a champion of charitable giving, and repeatedly lost his temper after claiming “I don’t lose my temper”. It also turned out that they tried to compromise OpenAI just a few days before the testing started, which doesn’t look good.
Then other people started talking about Musk, and it really didn’t get any better. He was repeatedly portrayed as temperamental and difficult to deal with. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, described them as irregular and unpredictable. The mother of his children revealed considerable behind-the-scenes machinations in the Musk camp that don’t exactly make him look like the altruistic protector of nonprofits that he’d like to be perceived as. He apparently suggested at one point that if he were the head of the for-profit branch of OpenAI, he would pass it on to his children if he died.
To top the whole thing off, Musk dropped the lawsuit to travel to China with Donald Trump despite being denied clemency by the judge.
greg brockman
Possibly the person with the lowest public profile compared to the major players in the case, Greg Brockman came out of the trial in much worse shape — not because no one had much to say about him, but because he was made to read and respond to his private journal while he was on the stand. It is a cruel fate.
What he wrote did not turn out good at all. At one point, he asked rhetorically in the text, “Financially, what will get me to $1B?” And later wrote, “It would be nice to make billions.” If you were trying to claim that you weren’t just trying to capitalize on the profitability of the company you co-founded, that’s the last thing you want to see in front of the public.
He also wrote about the idea of turning the company into a for-profit without Musk in charge, “It would be wrong to steal the nonprofit from them. To convert it to a B-Corp without them. That would be morally bankrupt enough.” But hey, they don’t count morality in your credit score.
Shivon Zilis
Through no small fault of her own, Shivon Zilis has had a rough few weeks. She became a central figure in the trial because she had a foot in both the OpenAI camp and the Musk camp when the split was underway. She’s definitely into Musk now, considering she lives with him and is the mother of his four children, as we learned during the trial. Despite this, Musk called her his “chief of staff” or “close advisor”, not a romantic or ideal partner.
(Zillis referred to himself and Musk as “friends and colleagues” who had a “one-off” that was “romantic in nature,” so it doesn’t sound like there are truly unrequited feelings here, just two people who have arranged their lives in a non-traditional way. That’s fine, just weird for a guy who’s really invested in “traditional values.”)
Zilis’s closeness to Musk and the communication the two shared may be the most damaging thing to come out of the trial. In a text sent to Musk shortly before leaving OpenAI, Zilis asked, “Do you prefer I remain close and friendly to OpenAI to keep information flowing or start to drift apart? The trust game is going to be tricky, so any guidance you have on how to do it right would be appreciated.” Musk responded, “Close and friendly, but we’re going to actively try to move three or four people from OpenAI to Tesla. Over time there will be more people involved, but we won’t be actively recruiting them.”
In emails between the two, Zilis also revealed that Musk was also exploring the possibility of OpenAI becoming for-profit, thereby undermining his entire argument that the organization was obligated to remain non-profit.
At one point in those emails, she mentioned that it was discussed that OpenAI would “switch to profit in the next few weeks (wow, fast!).” In another email, Zilis apparently offered Musk some ideas to kickstart Tesla’s own AI efforts. “One was making OpenAI a public benefit corporation subsidiary of Tesla. One was acquiring Altman as the ‘anchor’ for TeslaAI,” he wrote, which is not the kind of thing a person who is insisting on a company remaining non-profit would consider.
Zilis is in no way responsible for Musk’s own actions or behavior, but her communications with him have provided some potentially devastating insight into the matter. Take a hard look, but make no mistake, at the center of the proceedings are the spoiled rich who have created this mess.
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