Nilay Patel

And Sam Altman famously didn't take equity in this company, has spent a lot of time talking about how he didn't take equity in this company.

And then you start to poke at it and it's like, well, he has equity in that company that is now doing a deal with OpenAI and he has equity in that company, which is doing a deal with OpenAI.

I think Elon Musk's lawyers have a real vested interest in building a pattern of Sam Altman being unreliable and trying to make himself rich while building a nonprofit on Elon Musk's money.

But there are parts of that case that appear to be very straightforwardly compelling from Musk's side of things.

Well, ironically, it's not shady when they're all on the same team, right?

And then it just becomes, you know, there's so much money in this that we're all going to get rich and it's going to be fine.

And this is like what you see in WeWork, another thing where there was just an outrageous amount of self-dealing.

As long as the numbers keep going up and as long as everybody's getting rich, the things people will turn a blind eye to in that realm.

are outrageous.

But then we come to the falling out between Elon Musk and the OpenAI team.

And I think this is the part where Elon's case, kind of even in the very best case scenario, looks bad.

Because essentially what it seems like is, again, and we said this a little bit last week, there was this big fight over who was going to control OpenAI.

Elon Musk demanded everything.

He, at one point, tried to make OpenAI part of Tesla.

He said he was going to run OpenAI inside of Tesla in secret and apparently offered Sam Altman a board seat at Tesla.

It was like he wanted to subsume this whole thing.

He would say his motivations were to save the world.

You can feel about that however you want.

He lost that fight basically because the others teamed up and said giving essentially unilateral control to Elon Musk is not the right thing to do.

And he took his ball and went home making aggressive threats about Trump.