What I saw at the Musk-OpenAI trial: petty billionaires, protests and a stern judge

For the past couple of weeks, on the fourth floor of a courthouse on a quiet street in downtown Oakland, the world’s richest man and one of the world’s most valuable startups have been at war over the future of artificial intelligence.

Being one of the reporters in the room has felt like watching an updated, opposite-coast version of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities – ambition, ego, greed and the spectrum of social class on full display. The supporting cast has included Elon Musk fanboys, a stern judge and a who’s-who of Silicon Valley’s most influential people.

All courtroom battles are theatre, but this one has proved to be a unique spectacle, with the judge chastising the lawyers for leading the witness, raising meritless objections and even too much coughing. With Musk on the stand, he griped that an opposing attorney had asked a leading question, to which the judge told him to “tell the jury you’re not a lawyer”. He dutifully followed instructions, but then quickly quipped: “I did take Law 101”. The public burst out laughing.

The trial centers on Musk accusing Silicon Valley’s fastest-rising upstarts, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of deceiving and swindling him by founding OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 and then converting it to a for-profit company without him. Musk alleges that once Altman and Brockman got millions of his investment money, they flipped the script and made OpenAI into an extremely valuable startup – unjustly enriching themselves and the company.

Even in court filings, often the driest documents a reporter might read, this clash promised high drama. Years before Musk and Altman made their way to downtown Oakland to fight over corporate governance, they were each taking shots at the other’s character.

“Elon Musk’s case against Sam Altman and OpenAI is a textbook tale of altruism versus greed,” reads the complaint Musk first filed in August 2024. “The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI has chalked Musk’s claims up to a “public attack” that was “motivated by jealousy”. In opening statements, OpenAI lawyer William Savitt claimed that “since [Musk] couldn’t control OpenAI, he left it. He left it for dead”.

Watching this billionaire-on-billionaire melee has meant lining up in front of the courthouse before sunrise. And then, standing for roughly three hours shivering in the early morning cold waiting to be let up to the fourth floor. AI doomers, influencers, law students and reporters all vied for one of the 30 free seats in the actual courtroom rather than be relegated to the overflow room where people watched the proceedings on video screens. Accusations of line-cutting were thrown around regularly.

“We’re not used to these types of crowds,” the court’s media liaison told me.

As we non-billionaires waited to enter the building, small armies of lawyers carrying briefcases and sporting perfectly ironed suits would march through security in front of us. Only Marc Toberoff, Musk’s Hollywood entertainment lawyer who’s known for courtroom flair, entered by himself, separate from the other attorneys – looking the part of the loner in baggy suits with a black puffy jacket and a large backpack.

When Musk and Altman arrived, they were allowed to enter the building through a private entrance, and news photographers would rush to the building’s glass doors taking pictures of them going through security. On the first day, Musk had to go through the metal detector twice after his belt set it off. He’s known to wear Texas-size belt buckles since moving to Austin. Brockman always arrived through the main entrance, holding hands with his wife, Anna, who throughout the trial was never far from his side.

Though this trial concerns multibillion-dollar corporate structures and contractual agreements between AI’s most well-connected insiders, it has offered glimpses of the ticks and personalities of the world’s most wealthy people as they suffer the common indignities of a court’s egalitarian treatment.

**Inside Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s courtroom**

As the trial kicked off, it was clear the court belonged to the judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Known in the legal community for running a tight ship, lawyers refer to her simply as YGR. On day one, she explained to the nine-member jury that they had to be fair despite nearly all of them admitting to negative feelings about Musk.

“Look, the reality is that people don’t like him,” she told the court during jury selection.

Gonzalez Rogers offered Musk no special treatment. During his first full day of testimony, she started off the proceedings by reprimanding him for posting insults about Altman and Brockman on social media: “Scam Altman” and “Greg Stockman”.

“How can we get things done without you making things worse outside the courtroom?” the judge exclaimed.

In another instance, Gonzalez Rogers became exasperated with Musk’s repeated testimony about AI robot armies wiping out the human race, something he referred to as “the terminator situation”, the sci-fi film about a robot insurrection.

“We are not going to get into issues of catastrophe and extinction,” Gonzalez Rogers scolded. “I suspect that there are a number of people who do not want to put the future of humanity in Mr Musk’s hands … But we’re not going to get into that.”

She added, perhaps to the chagrin of the AI doomers in the crowd: “This is not a trial on the safety risks of artificial intelligence.”

In the courtroom, with its hard wooden pews, experienced lawyers brought pillows to sit on, and reporters furiously tapped on their laptops. On Cinco de Mayo, Gonzalez Rogers started the day telling a brief history of the holiday and said she brought homemade tamales for her team. A Texas native, the judge said her state’s tamales are mostly meat and “here in California, it’s all masa and no meat”.

Gonzalez Rogers gave the court only two 20-minute breaks during each day’s proceedings. One of her rationales was that she didn’t want jurors to eat a big lunch and get sleepy. The hallways filled with ravenous reporters sharing baby carrots and meat sticks and fanboys looking to brush arms with billionaires. Musk marched up and down the hallway with his entourage of security guards and Hollywood friend Ari Emanuel. Altman and Brockman, also with security detail, were both seen using the public bathroom.

During the three days of Musk’s testimony, the overflow room, which fits 100 people, filled with onlookers. At one point, more than a dozen people were lying on the floor staring up at the screens. The court dealt with several IT glitches in getting the proceedings streamed to the room.

In one instance, Musk’s lawyer’s microphone kept going out. Gonzalez Rogers quipped: “What can I tell you? We are funded by the federal government.” At another moment, when the sound was low, the judge looked over at OpenAI’s team and asked if “all you tech people in the room” could help with the AV system.

So far, we’ve heard testimony from Musk, his secretive first lieutenant Jared Birchall and the mother of four of his children Shivon Zilis, among others. Brockman also testified for two days. We watched as Musk chewed on his lips, rolled his neck and took swigs of water when he appeared tired on the stand. And as Brockman unemotionally described a scene of Musk getting angry: “Something really changed, something just shifted in him … He stood up and stormed around the table … I thought he was going to hit me”.

The trial is expected to wrap in the coming week after jurors hear from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former OpenAI employee and wunderkind Ilya Sutskever. It’s not clear yet whether Altman will take the stand.

Every afternoon, as the court emptied out, a smattering of protesters waited outside. Some days, they unfurled massive red banners that read “STOP AI” and made larger-than-life billboards of Musk in a bathing suit. Other days, they paraded through the courtyard toting posters with drawings of Musk and Altman that read: “Am I the asshole? Everyone sucks here.”