Casey Newton

My clients had the nerve to go on and succeed without him.

Mr. Musk did not like that.

They have also been pointing out that

Elon had also wanted to make OpenAI have a for-profit subsidiary back when he was with the company and that he's just mad that he didn't get to control it.

Right.

He also wanted to fold OpenAI into Tesla.

That was revealed in some of these emails.

Tesla, of course, being a for-profit company.

So it seems like this is not exactly a consistent and principled stand.

But Casey, what are the stakes here?

Like if Elon Musk does manage to convince a jury that this was a case of OpenAI looting a nonprofit for its own commercial gain, like

What could the remedies be?

Could this be fatal for OpenAI?

Or is this just sort of an attempt to slow them down and distract them with a big trial?

Yeah.

I think the lawsuit and this ongoing litigation between Elon Musk and OpenAI has been very distracting for OpenAI.

But as a journalist and as a person who wants to know more about the inner workings of how these companies run, I think it's been actually very valuable for a lot of these emails and early communications between OpenAI leaders to be released as part of this litigation.

I have found it very useful in understanding some of the early dynamics at OpenAI.

And it also just illustrates the degree to which these projects are all just sort of fueled by grudges, right?

There's sort of one level of interpretation, which is like all of these people are just like obsessed with building the machine god and that this is all sort of related to their visions of the future.