Musk v. Altman: Much ado about nothing

Today I’m talking with Liz Lopatto, who spent the last month covering the Musk v. Altman trial in all its chaos. You’ll hear her describe the courthouse as a “zoo” and explain that there were protests of one kind or another happening outside every day. Both Elon Musk and Sam Altman are big personalities, and people have a lot of feelings about both of them and the AI industry. And in the end… nothing happened! The jury found that Elon had filed his lawsuit after the statute of limitations had run out. You’ll hear Liz explain exactly what’s going on there. Beyond that, the trial was nominally about OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit entity from a nonprofit one and if the way OpenAI went about it cost Elon Musk money. But really, the suit seems mostly to have been about Elon Musk being mad at Sam Altman — or at OpenAI, for being successful without him — and wanting him punished in some way. So in a room full of untrustworthy, unreliable people all fighting with each other, did anyone even have a reputation left to lose? Is there a floor? Okay: Liz Lopatto on Musk v. Altman. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Liz Lopatto, you are a senior chaos reporter here at The Verge. You just covered the Sam Altman v. Elon Musk trial. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you. Always a pleasure to be here. I feel like it’s always some new, relatively insane thing that we’re talking about. We have to stop meeting under these circumstances. I think these are your favorite circumstances. They are my favorite circumstances. A few times a year, we drive you absolutely batty by sending you to cover something, and this trial was 100% one of those situations. The copy got increasingly unhinged. I think the audience liked it. But you were in the courtroom for the majority of Musk v. Altman. You got to see a bunch of the testimony live as these guys took the stand, as Mira Murati and others took the stand. We’ll start at the high level. I think