neither person in this story is a hero you have Elon Musk who is often seen and portrayed as a supervillain and sometimes plays into that characterization himself then you have Sam Altman on the other side huge question mark over him his honesty his integrity that was a big part of the reason why the board moved against him if 2018 was the moment where really we realized that we are the product, not necessarily just the consumers. I think perhaps this moment in 2026 is the time that we realise the sort of grown-up aspect of a lot of these executives is just an act and actually they're as flawed, if not flawed, in all of us. Today on The Tech Report, I'm joined by the tech journalist Chris Stoker-Walker. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. We've got a lot of testimony and some interesting revelations to cover from the Musk-Altman lawsuit this week as it kind of wrapped up the last full day of testimony yesterday. But before we do get into all of those sorts of things, for those who haven't been following the news as closely as you or I may have been, what is the lawsuit about and what are the impacts it could have on the tech industry? So Elon Musk basically doesn't like Sam Altman, is the reason why this lawsuit exists, and hasn't liked Sam Altman for around about seven or eight years now. So if we wind back all the way to 2015, the founding of OpenAI involved Sam Altman, it involved Elon Musk, it also involved Greg Brockman, who is the sort of third wheel, as it were, on this trial that is going on, often with the most damaging revelations because he kept a diary, which I think is one big takeaway that we will see from this trial, is tech executives not committing their thoughts to paper quite as readily. But back in 2015, OpenAI was founded with the principle of being a vast benefit for humanity. It was by clue of its name meant to be open and transparent and helpful for all of society. But then obviously profit got in the way and the potential to make profit, to try and get some sort of money out of this. As OpenAI and other AI labs realised post-2017 with the release of a seminal paper called Attention is All You Need, that this AI thing might be quite a big deal. So 2017 into 2018, we've learned a lot more detail than we already knew about this through the lawsuit, but Altman and Musk started to fall out about the future direction of open AI and the idea that actually this thing that Elon Musk had bankrolled in order to actually get it off the ground would start to forswear its founding principles. So Musk and Altman had this big bust up ever since Elon Musk has been a big opponent of OpenAI and everything that it does. That got exacerbated by the rise of ChatGPT and the way that really set the race going for generative AI. And Musk has taken this to court to say, well, first of all these people have gone back on that founding principle he initially said that they were defrauding him though he's not been able to make that stick in court and that's been dropped entirely from the lawsuit and basically just also that he doesn't like them and that seems to be to be honest the whole gist of his argument ottman testified that he never agreed in any binding way to to keep open ai a non-profit entity i mean the the prosecution didn't prove the opposite in their examination of altman as a as a as a witness so where does that leave musk's case because surely that is the the foundation of of what what musk is arguing yeah nowhere good is the long and the short of it i think that's something that we touched on when we last talked about the trial and that people have talked about for the last week and plus on the tech report all the various voices that you've had talking about this lawsuit is that really Elon Musk was on a bit of a hiding to nothing. This was always going to be incredibly difficult for him to prove. His prosecution effectively had to produce a smoking gun that said here is the bit of paper that says we will never pursue this for-profit aspect. We will always maintain this as a public good project and they've not been able to do that. So really the case at the minute seems to land on Elon Musk saying he was betrayed in some way and you have to take his word for it. The problem of course there is as we learned in the very early days of this trial and the jury selection for it. Remember the jury won't actually be making the decision here. It is the judge in this case that is going to be adjudicating whether or not this case has merit and if so what the impact might be but the jury is there as an advisory role for the judge if things get a little bit tricky we couldn't find jurors who didn't have a dislike and a distrust of Elon Musk so effectively what he's trying to say is I don't have that hard evidence that suggests that there's been a going back or a negging on that binding agreement that we made because there isn a binding agreement as far as we can tell So instead he saying you have to take my word for it now decade plus recollections of what was said in advance of the creation of this company and in its early founding years And by the way, you have to discount all this stuff that you've read about me, all this stuff that you think about me and truly believe that I am a trustworthy individual. I mean, to your point, a cornerstone of OpenAI's defense is making the point that Elon Musk is just angry because he wasn't allowed to take control and jealous because, well, OpenAI is more successful than XAI is. I mean, Altman's testimony unsurprisingly followed this narrative as well, but is this narrative working? You obviously point to the jurors having a similar perspective of Elon Musk. I mean, does this really materially impact Elon Musk's case? I think that it certainly weakens it a little bit. I mean, it doesn't blow it out of the water, because to be perfectly honest, you probably came into this trial with a preconceived idea of whether or not you believed or trusted Elon Musk or didn't. And truthfully, I don't think that what we've heard in the case so far, and obviously we've now basically concluded all of the evidence that you will hear as testimony, is going to change that. You know, Musk is someone who I think does bear grudges. He's pretty transparent about that. Even in the early days of the trial, he was promoting posts that were anti-Altman in the early days of it, to the extent that the judge had to step in and say, look, this isn't becoming of two people of your stature to get involved in this. And so that argument that the open AI lawyers are making, that Elon Musk is just bitter about the fact that he's not doing very well in this AI race, that he's effectively third, fourth or fifth in what's going to be probably a one or two horse race. I think it sticks pretty well because it does chime with most people's perceptions of this and you know if you're open AI lawyers you're probably looking at some of the decisions that have been made in the announcements that have come out of xai spacex as it's kind of been subsumed into then rubbing your hands with glee because you could look at some of the stuff that's happened a massive deal in the last week or so between spacex the company that now owns effectively xai and also Anthropic, one of the big competitors of OpenAI, to try and provide compute for Anthropic's increasing demand based on their popularity of clawed code and other products that they serve and go, well, I can point to that as yet more evidence that Elon Musk is bitter because he's getting into bed with his enemy in order to annoy an even greater enemy of OpenAI. I did when I saw the headline of Elon Musk selling compute from Colossus to Anthropic, I think the timing was quite interesting. Getting into some of the testimony, what have we learned about Sam Altman's brief firing and especially the calls for him to be reinstated considering some of the claims of him being deceitful or disruptive or intentionally pitting CEOs against each other, which we'll get into a bit later? Yeah, one of the things that we talked about when we talked at the start of this trial was the likelihood of this being settled or even an agreement being reached before it actually started and I think there were pretty good odds on that just because of the reputational damage that can occur when you are litigating stuff in court and truthfully I think Sam Altman's reputation has taken a pretty significant dent as well here because as you say we had the books opened up on what exactly happened in that small interregnum around Thanksgiving 2023 when he was briefly deposed as CEO of OpenAI and then we had this massive employee revolt to bring him back in that place. Some really damning testimony from Helen Tona at the Georgetown Centre of Security and Emerging Technology, at the time was a board member of OpenAI. We know was certainly not Sam Altman's biggest fan. I spoke to her actually for a story that was unrelated to this just about two or three days before she appeared at trial and she was very unwilling to go into anything to do with that. I think she wanted to leave it all out on the witness stand and ended up doing so painting Sam Altman in a pretty bad light but then we've also heard from other people like Mira Morati the the idea of how chaotic this was. She was effectively the point person within OpenAI trying to sort out all of this mess, acting as a go-between between Sam Altman and the board who didn't want him back. And some really awful internal messaging that got released, including sounding out potential investors on who would be acceptable or not for the CEO role and also for the board when they decided to bring Altman back. Part of the decision making there was that you'd have to replace lots of board members who would try to depose him. And you learned frankly quite how catty a lot of these people can be I mean it just smacked of chaos at the time And obviously that is harmful and damaging for a company that is trying to show off its face as the respectable front of a potentially world technology And bear in mind, these are people with ears and eyes within government. And they're trying to convince these high-ranking politicians, people within government, that actually some of the models that they release should be trusted and that they are a well-run company. And frankly, some of the stuff that we heard in court suggests that that might be a little bit more of a complicated picture than first thought. Ilya Sutskiver, I think, also echoed the words of Miriam Marati saying that Altman was deceptive and pitting executives against each other and trying to keep control through divide and conquer. Aside from the damaging to Altman's personal reputation, has that had really any effect on which way the judge might rule? I don't think so because I think that it certainly knocked Sam Altman's reputation again the truth is this is a trial between two people who many many individuals have deep suspicions and deep dislikes about neither person in this story is a hero you have Elon Musk who is often seen and portrayed as a supervillain and sometimes plays into that characterization himself then You have Sam Altman on the other side, who, because of that deposition in 2023 as CEO, a huge question mark over him, his honesty, his integrity. That was a big part of the reason why the board moved against him. For the judge who's trying to unpick this, I mean, the personalities in theory shouldn't actually matter. They are adjudicating on what they see in front of them in terms of the facts. but you know I think that you know Sam Altman was already kind of damaged goods in the public perception because people knew that you know there was something a little bit sneaky about him he's seen as as very expedient in what he's doing some might even say Machiavellian in terms of his decision making and and that became all the more clearer as we saw the internal communications between OpenAI where you had people literally testifying that they were being told Sam Altman had said they had said stuff and then they confronted him and then he said that he hadn't said that at all altman remained pretty calm during his testimony and his and his examination but like he's like you say there's quite a significant paper trail of contradictory statements proving that maybe he was being intentionally deceptive and that kind of thing did that kind of cut through this slick persona that he was presenting and maybe to maybe your final point there make him look a little bit more slimy than slick ironically actually i think it reinforces the the general public perception of him which he is an enormously polished media character but there's something beneath that that is often quite expedient and machiavellian so i think that really what this does is that reinforces that case now you know the bigger question is does that have an impact on the overall case does that weigh up the idea in a kind of irrefutable form than actually Elon Musk's argument is right. The reality is I don't think it does do that, but it does, I think, reinforce a lot of what the whisper networks have been in Silicon Valley. The idea that Sam Altman can be a little bit tough to be around in terms of actually pinning him down to a point of view and also that interpersonal relationship aspect, which again was the talk of everybody within the tech world that actually he's quite difficult because he'll be very much nice and sweet to you but also there is his idea of what's going on in his brain and figuring out what is best for him and for his company to kind of counteract and figure out as well. During the testimony of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella he explained his honestly kind of boring deal with OpenAI which completely goes against the sort of shadowy illicit takeover picture that musk's team was trying to paint but i suppose was was that surprising that it was just kind of a boring deal and if i suppose if it wasn't surprising would would that kind of make trying to paint it as something that was shadowy and illicit a bit of a desperate final act from elon musk's legal team yeah i mean it was desperate and it smacks of the way that elon musk thinks i mean you know he is someone who who dabbles in conspiratorial thinking, who often thinks that the world is against him, makes mountains out of molehills, and turns out that we had that here. Satya Nadella's had a brilliant trial. He's really looked like the only grown-up in the room, I think, at times, and that's actually the most significant moment of all of this, is if you look at this, there are people losing their heads all around this, particularly in that 2023 small-time brief deposition of Sam Altman as CEO. You have panicked frantic texts going back and forth between Miramirati and Satya Nadella trying to understand what the consequences are trying to figure out what can happen pleading with Satya Nadella to make a public statement in support of either Sam Altman or OpenAI whichever way he wanted to do and you see these texts going one after the other after the other after the other to Satya Nadella and there nothing coming back in the public record. Now that doesn't mean that Satya Nadella wasn't talking, it just means that he's smart enough to realise this sort of thing could end up in a court case through discovery at some point in the future and I need to make sure that I'm avoiding any potential risk that comes from that so yeah he turns out i think to be the only grown up in the room to be honest at many times during this trial looking more broadly the the image of big tech as a virtuous industry which started in people's garages and is bringing power to the people has kind of already eroded pretty affected pretty much completely by this point perhaps do you think that the the boardroom chaos the financial greed that's being exposed and the the impact that that's now had on people's view on the Silicon Valley ecosystem might end up being the biggest story at the end of this lawsuit. Yeah, we've already had a long-standing distrust of technology pretty much ever since around about the time actually that Sam Altman and Elon Musk were starting to bust up in 2018. That year, of course, we saw the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I think really the scales dropped from many people's eyes about what intentions big tech companies had around us and just how much we were treated as data rather than as people. This I think reinforces that. I think it shows not so much just that there should be distrust there but I think it's more harmful less in terms of what it tells us about the broader goals of big tech which is something that we've already understood. You know the idea that they will undercut you, they will go behind your back, They will do whatever they can to win, which is Elon Musk's argument here. And obviously, Sam Altman and his defence team are saying the opposite and pointing that back to Elon Musk, who has those skeletons in his closet as well. But it's more, I think, about actually, it puts the lie to the idea that these are responsible adults. And that's the most damaging thing. In post Cambridge Analytica 2018, we saw and have increasingly seen through the years, these leaders appearing in front of parliamentary hearings, congressional testimonies, being called to the Senate to account for some of the problems that they have. and they've often worn a suit walked up to these things sat behind a desk and and looked like competent really well-established sensible adults i'm not so sure that some of the stuff that we've seen in terms of them running around like headless chickens trying to figure out what's going on and battling with their egos along the way doesn't undercut that in a really fatal way so So, you know, if 2018 was the moment where really we realised that, you know, we are the product, not necessarily just the consumers, I think perhaps this moment in 2026 is the time that we realise, you know, the sort of grown-up aspect of a lot of these executives is just an act. And actually, they're as flawed, if not flawed, in all of us. So closing statements are today and then next week will be the remedies phase of the lawsuit where decisions are essentially made over the future of AI. Well, and OpenAI. Do you think we could still see a settlement before that judgment? Or have we kind of got through the worst of the mud throwing? And everybody's been saying from the start that this is an uphill battle for Elon Musk. And I don't think that's changed particularly over the last couple of weeks. No, it hasn't. And I think that's really going to be the outcome here. In terms of a settlement, I think it's probably too late now, to be perfectly honest. I think probably if you're OpenAI's lawyers, you're relatively confident where the judge will come down next week. And that will be a relative positive for you. The attempt or the opportunity to try and avoid some of the reputational damage that we've seen to all parties to this lawsuit really has come and gone and it was before the suit began. We know that Elon Musk contacted OpenAI representatives before the suit began, before the case was beginning to be heard and offered the opportunity for an out, didn't get much of a positive response at all there. I think that's really the consequence here. So next week, I mean, you shouldn't be betting on this, but if you're a betting person, then Elon Musk will probably lose as we have established and as we thought would always be the case. Probably just a little bit of water off his back, not too bad because he's incredibly rich. I think that open AI comes out of this relatively scot-free, but also damaged in terms of their reputation. it reinforces and strengthens some of the beliefs that people have about its leadership and about its goals for all of us um and yeah i guess unfortunately we all seem to lose out a little bit here because you know it's it's instructive in one way in that it gives us more transparency but you know you would hope that actually it had disproved some of those fears that we have turns out probably not well chris stoker walker thanks for taking the time thank you if you enjoyed today's episode and you want to hear more of the tech report please consider liking and subscribing also if you didn't know you can get episodes of the tech report wherever you get your podcasts
