The Daily - The Courtroom Showdown Between Elon Musk and Sam Altman

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

For the last three weeks, a messy, dramatic battle has played out between two of the most powerful titans of tech in the world: Elon Musk and Sam Altman. As jury deliberations begin today, the technology reporter Mike Isaac takes us inside the courtroom drama and explains how a corporate dispute got extremely personal. Guest: Mike Isaac, a New York Times reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering tech companies and Silicon Valley. Background reading:  Inside the courtroom circus with Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Musk lawyer’s question for Sam Altman on the stand: Are you trustworthy? Photo: Manuel Orbegozo/Reuters, Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketrowaf. This is the Daily. For the last three weeks, a messy, dramatic battle has played out between two of the most powerful titans of tech in the world, Elon Musk and Sam Altman. In a high-stakes lawsuit, Musk is seeking to cripple one of the leaders of the AI boom, open AI, and remove Altman as its chief executive. Today, as jury deliberations in the trial begin, tech reporter Mike Isaac takes us inside the courtroom drama

and explains how a corporate dispute got extremely personal. It's Monday, May 18. Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Can you hear me? Mike, you made it. I'm sorry, I've been so harried. Thank you for dealing with it. I mean, are you hanging in? It seems like it's been a long day.

I'm pretty fried, man. It's been like three weeks of 12-hour days, 5 a.m. mornings. It's pretty intense. Yeah, three weeks, no breaks covering the Musk Altman trial every single day. I have so many questions. Just tell us what that's been like. What have you seen? So it's downtown Oakland. It's the Battle of the Billionaires here at the District Court. People show up at like 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning most days. And right from the beginning,

This song is hot off the press. It's kind of like the circus is entering town. Ready? He calls himself an altruist. But look at what he's done. His race to Super A-I could kill each and everyone. You have a bunch of protest groups. You have people who hate Sam Haltman.

You have people who hate Elon Musk. Musk's ego. marches on evil mustress. You have people who hate everyone involved. So again, we have trillionaires and billionaires arguing over open AI, while hundreds of thousands of workers cannot afford to live in the region. Oh, and I forgot to mention the, you know, those like wavy car dealership things? Sure, iconic.

So there's that with an Elon sucks printed in big block letters on. on it. Okay. There's a more intense one of Musk doing the Sig Heil salute. Wow. Like the arms are doing the Heil. Yes. I don't actually know how they did the engineering to make that work, but all of which is to say, it's a scene. Right. I talk to one woman who is retired and was a university administrator and has just been showing up because it's fun. Everyone is showing up, hoping to get into the courtroom, which is only like 30 unreserved seats. So it's kind of like trying to get in the club, but the club is people worried about the end of the world because of AI, basically. So high intensity atmosphere outside the courtroom, clearly. What about inside? You know, we all have to go into this federal

courthouse. And it's a pretty intimate hallway that leads to the courtroom. And then on the other side is like a holding pin where they keep all the like billionaires that don't want to be around people like me all day. And they have to essentially walk past us to get into the courtroom. So every day, on the way in, you have Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, one of the other co-founders of Open AI, all the sort of like bigwigs of AI kind of coming down to earth and dealing with the press and the public and their fans and their detractors. But it's more than that. It's this moment where the stakes are pretty big here. Talk about that.

Yeah, it's Musk levying this lawsuit, which has been years now in the making. He's saying that with this project that he got involved with Open AI so many years ago, he was duped, essentially, from creating what he thought would be a nonprofit to build artificial intelligence for the good of mankind. And instead, what Elon Musk says is that he was tricked by his co-founders, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, who decided they wanted to make it a for-profit company once they had stars and dollar signs in their eyes. And I think it's, you know, there's a lot of lawsuits that fly around Silicon Valley, but this one could really damage Open AI, what is now almost a trillion dollar private company. Say why? So Musk is asking for a lot.

For one, he wants $150 billion with a B dollars in damages. But he's saying, not for me, of course, it's to be returned to the nonprofit organization, which is like the parent of Open AI, the for-profit company. So it's like this quote-unquote selfless moment that he's trying to do. Musk is also asking for them to unwind this for-profit structure that they've devised and basically turn Open AI back into exclusively a nonprofit. And finally, we have, I guess what would be the coup de grace for management, which is to basically remove Sam Altman and Greg Brockman from the top of the company and the board of directors. And that's a big deal. So it's a lot.

Mike, I think it's going to be news to people that Open AI even has a nonprofit company attached to it. So I want you to kind of go back to the beginning, which seems like is at the heart of this case. Yes. Rewind to 2015, we have this moment of Elon Musk sitting down with Larry Page, chief executive of Google, and having basically a big disagreement over the future of what AI should look like. Musk says, I'm very worried. Apparently, he's been talking at parties forever, how he's very concerned. about the future of AI and it harming humanity. Larry Page says, whatever, it's fine.

You know, the way that AI will progress, even if it's not for the good of mankind, it's still going to be okay because AI will survive past us. Musk is shocked and aghast by that and saying, you know, you don't care about humanity. Page calls him a speciesist, which is a funny, new to me word. Not a term I've heard.

100% saying, you know, like he's being discriminatory against an artificial intelligence robot. And Elon's like, I got to do something about Google, goes and starts talking with Sam Altman, who then was running a startup incubator in Silicon Valley and saying, this is existential stuff.

We need to worry about what AI could do for the future. Thus, OpenAI was born. And the idea was, we should be the ones building the future of artificial intelligence, but we need to be. to do it safely and build it in an altruistic manner, let's say. And Elon Musk was the money man, right? He had made a ton of money on PayPal. He was building Tesla and doing really well. He had SpaceX. And, you know, this feels long ago, but his star was also pretty high. And there was,

it was mostly seeing him as like Iron Man slash Boy Wonder Inventions Guy and, you know, the entrepreneur that everyone loved. So he was the. one that was like, okay, I'm going to fund this thing that's a money-losing endeavor, but that's the point because we're doing this for the good of mankind, basically. And from the beginning, everyone involved, including Musk, Altman, they agree, AI is this incredibly important technology and that it's really critical that they be in charge of it as an altruistic endeavor so that in their minds, the good guys are the stewards of this ultra-powerful thing that's coming.

The thought is Altman is going to build it and Musk is going to fund it. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, the funny thing going on in this trial, too, is just sort of seeing a window into how they were talking about it over email at the time. And, like, this was when no one cared about AI and it was kind of a fringe pursuit. And they were all talking about it, like the far-flung universe in which AI was going to take over the world. They were serious about it.

It's interesting because we hear so much of that now, these dumerous kind of concerns about AI, but you're saying privately amongst each other, they were voicing that early on. Yeah, totally. I mean, I've been out here in the Valley for like 16, 17 years and pretty cynical. And usually when I hear these sort of grand proclamations about worrying about humanity, I'm just like, okay, all right. But like, they've been talking about this for a long time in the same way and weren't performing on an email chain of three people. Okay. So these guys joined forces. They're aligned on mission. What happens next? Yeah. So Musk, who, by the way, is running multiple companies is kind of a figure in the background who is paying the rent. He's got the checks coming in, funding this thing, while Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are trying to do the work of building the next generation AI models, right? We get to around 2017, 2018.

Greg and Sam start talking about if we need to develop these models the way we want to, we are going to need a heck of a lot more money. And maybe like in the millions, tens of millions, billions even, like long before the insane sums we know we're spending now. But they start saying this not-for-profit model, the way we have it structured may not work entirely. They're basically realizing this is going to be super resource intensive and a nonprofit isn't going to get us where we need to be to build the thing we need to build. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so what we started seeing come out in the trial is emails between Sam Altman and Greg Brockman trying to figure out just exactly how they could change this nonprofit structure into something that could help them get the money they needed. And so what do they do?

So there's this sort of like interesting Cold War battle brewing between Sam and Elon and other folks involved. They're exchanging these increasingly terse and tense emails with one another. And Musk is worried that he's essentially losing his grasp on this nonprofit company. And so he has this idea of moving opening. AI inside of Tesla to say, hey, we can incubate it in here. This is where we can build AI. Altman bucks at that idea. And things basically fall apart. And so at that point, Elon says, look, I'm out. Go with God. Good luck. I'm doing my own thing. Wow. He's out. He cuts bait over this. That's right. He's just like tired of it. And you have to understand too. AI development at the time was not what it is now. It wasn't like him saying,

I don't care about the hottest technology ever. This thing was costing him money and it was making him frustrated and he was arguing at them on a thing that he didn't know if it would ever work. Right. And for Open AI, does that mean that the Elon money spigot then turns off? Practically, what's the consequence for them? I mean, it's funny. He actually does continue to pay rent on their offices for a few more months, which is nice of him,

I guess. But Sam and Greg start talking to Microsoft, the king of software from, forever. They've been doing a bunch of AI spending for a long time. They realize that Google is very far ahead of them in AI. And so Microsoft Sachinadella, the CEO says, hey, do we need to get on this AI train? Should we be funding this research in OpenAI? That's sort of the deal they start arranging and, you know, Sam and Greg negotiate this thing where Microsoft will now be the backer of incubating AI research inside of OpenAI, and Microsoft promises OpenAI a billion dollars. And it's important there because the amount of money that Elon Musk spent on this was

$38 million, which... It's a lot to me. Yeah, it's more than I may. Right, but in the grand scheme of things. In the grand scheme of things, it's nothing compared to how much Microsoft and others would eventually put into this. Okay, so the split at this point doesn't sound that acrimonious. Like, it doesn't sound that bitter if he's still paying the rent.

It's just kind of like, okay, we agree to part ways. Yes. So then how does it get to the point where Musk is now suing them for $150 billion? Open AI almost unceremoniously releases chat GPT in 2022 their chat bot that they didn't really think was a big deal at the time, but they put it out in the world. And then the thing goes crazy. Like, it literally becomes the most. downloaded app of all time overnight.

It also wakes up every big company in the Valley saying, okay, time to invest enormous amounts of money in this. And Microsoft decides to really step it up and invest $10 billion in OpenAI. Well, which is a lot of money. The one person who doesn't like this when they hear about it is Elon Musk. Why?

So if you're Elon Musk and you're, and you're thinking, okay, I left this AI startup that I founded, co-founded as a nonprofit, and now all of a sudden this thing sure seems like it's taking on the characteristics of a for-profit company with a significant amount of investment. I'm not happy. And so he fires off this message to Sam Altman just being like, dude, what are you doing? This feels like a bait and switch. So this is the moment when Elon gets really mad at Open AI. It's after they have this hit on their hands. It's after they start to look dominant in this industry. And if I'm not wrong about this, isn't this also when Musk himself is launching an AI company around the same time? You are not wrong about this.

He starts building XAI, which is his own version of developing the next generation AI models. he wants to essentially compete with what OpenAI is doing. Just curious, was Musk's AI project a nonprofit? Funny you asked that, actually. It was not a nonprofit. This is a for-profit company. And you're getting at something, which I think is really key to the case. Sam Altman and Elon Musk are both accusing each other of being hypocritical in what they're doing.

you know, I think this case is basically like deciding which billionaire you believe. We'll be right back. Mike, you're telling us this whole trial hinges on how credible members of the jury find these two tech titans, which billionaire they believe. So let's get into the stories that these billionaires told about themselves in their testimonies, which I understand were quite. explosive. Let's start with Musk. Here's something you should probably think about leading up to the trial. There was actually some difficulty in finding a jury that wasn't biased against Musk for a little while because of, you might be surprised, but because of his recent political activities, because he was willing to be very vocal about his politics online, he's aligned with President Trump in a lot of

ways. And one way that Musk started off his testimony and his lawyer started questioning them is to go back to that era we were talking about where people still revered Elon Musk. He created PayPal. He co-created Tesla and SpaceX. And they tried to paint him as this serial entrepreneur, dreamer guy who just wants to do things that are good for the world and good for humanity. Do you think that worked, Mike? It makes sense that they wanted to do that, that it succeed. Jury trials like this are always a crapshoot. You really don't know if people are going to buy it or not. But I was looking at the jury the whole time. And there's something powerful about having the world's literal, richest and most powerful men in front of you. And the way that they deliver these testimonies is

they don't face the lawyers. They face the jury and they're maybe a few feet away. And so Elon Musk, this guy who was at least once revered as like the heir to Steve Jobs as far as creativity and technology telling you that he cares about humanity, he cares about you, the jurors, and is doing this for you. I think it was probably smart for them to kind of at least lay that groundwork and this is where Elon Musk was when he was building open AI. And what was he like on the stand? Musk has like all these interesting mannerisms.

You know, he tends to mutter and rammed. but in a occasionally self-effacing and even charming way, if you can believe that. He talks about these big grand things, you know, oh, I want to go to Mars, I want to save humanity, but doesn't do it with the grandeur of a carnival barker or P.T. Barnum. He's just sort of muttering it as an engineer would be saying something, right? And it's very interesting. That is interesting because I was going to say, claiming that you want to save humanity,

it feels like that could go one of two ways. Either you sound like a megalomaniac, frankly, or you sound like an altruist. 100%. I remember actually at a tech conference years ago where he was doing similar sort of way of delivering his big, grand thoughts, and it really worked on the crowd

because of exactly what you said. There is a sort of interesting charm that I think works on a certain crowd when he says it so matter-of-factly, like, this is just his life and the way he thinks about, I don't know, going to the grocery stories. Like, okay, I got to buy vegetables. I got to buy some soda and I have to take us to Mars eventually. That's what his daily list looks like, I guess.

Fundamentally, Musk's argument in the case is that Altman deceived him. Did he come off as genuinely hurt? Yeah, so there was a very clear line that Musk, and his attorneys sort of went over and over, which was they're trying to steal a charity. And if you allow Open AI to get away with this, no charity will ever be safe in the future is basically how he positioned it.

And I think that was just sort of laying the groundwork for little old me. I'm this billionaire who also wants to save humanity and do it altruistically without any sort of hint of profit, while my counterpart sitting across from me over there is this Machiavellian guy who, once he got the whiff of money from this endeavor, decided to change the whole thing and pull the rug out from under me. But I think the most memorable part was upon cross-examination from Open AIs attorneys. That's when Elon Musk, the fighter, let the fireworks out, essentially. Tell me what happened.

Yeah. So I think this actually kind of goes to the heart of how Open AI is trying to prove its case. They're saying Elon Musk is just a spurn guy who feels like he's being out-competed and he's mad that he didn't have control over this thing. And the way that Open AI's attorneys come at Musk is, I think, a way that Musk probably doesn't get spoken to that often. He starts getting prodded by crossing. examination and questions insinuating that he's being untruthful or hypocritical or contradictory. And the humble sort of awshuck's entrepreneurial musk from before starts melting away.

And we get Musk the pugilist, right? He starts getting snippy and saying, you're being disingenuous. You're not telling the truth. The questions you're asking me are not yes or no questions. and getting really sort of caught up in the details of how he's being spoken to, it went from like inspirational tone to him being really mad and really upset with the other attorneys. And it's one of those things that could go either way.

When he was getting these little clapbacks in, let's say, there were guys around me who were clearly there to view Musk, and they would do little fist pumps or laugh at like Musk's jokes or snippiness. and the gallery was sort of popping off. Were people really fist bumping in the audience? Oh, my God, you have no idea. It was a wild gallery when I was in the back. I would hear snickers around me from people who were clearly fans of Musk

when they felt he was scoring a point against the lawyers. It was like a show, man. It was like really... This is like a cage match happening. It was a trip. That was the thing. It was sort of like people wanted the Elon show and they got it. And it was one of these moments for the opening up.

lawyers to show, hey, look, this is how Elon Musk can get when he doesn't get his way, essentially. It was the idea that this is about Musk being mad, that he's not in control, he's being left behind, and now he's throwing a tantrum. Okay, what about Sam Altman? What was the Altman show? Yeah, so, how do I put this? I wouldn't call him, like, classically charismatic. Sure.

But I think he has a type of charisma that actually works for him. He's more soft-spoken. He was leaning into this sort of like, I'm an entrepreneur who cares about the world, clearly not as famous as Elon Musk, but I came from humble beginnings. And I built startups. I worked in Silicon Valley with other optimistic entrepreneurs. And it worked for him, you know. Like, I think it was a chance for him to really present himself to the jury for

the first time. And I do think that he presented well in that regard. You know, he tried to talk about his passion for tech and for building things and this idea of getting into the technology industry to make a positive difference in the world. And how did Musk's lawyers try to poke holes in that image? So this is where things get super gnarly for Altman. There has been peace after of the image of Sam Altman being chipped away in public. A lot of this started when he was briefly fired from his job from the board of directors and then reinstated, which the reason he was fired was because he was, quote, unquote, not consistently candid with the executives at the company.

There have been articles about him being duplicitous, telling people one thing, and then telling people completely opposite things five minutes later. There's a particularly damning article in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, basically painting him as just a fundamentally untrustworthy person. Right. So while he may not be as famous as Elon Musk, the information that has been made public about him and that has gotten a lot of attention recently

has basically amounted to accusations that he's deceptive. I mean, if this is any indication, literally the first question out of Elon Musk's counsel's mouth was, are you trustworthy? Wow. Throwing down the gauntlet. Just like a bucket of cold water in his face right off of the bat. And it was funny, actually, because I don't even know how I would answer that. I would probably say, like, I think so or something. But like...

You are trustworthy, Mike. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. And I think he said what I said. Like, I think so. Like, yeah, I would like to believe so. And then immediately Elon's lawyers were like, oh, you think so? You're not immediately trustworthy.

Are you not trustworthy? Like, it was brutal. And it was very much just a parade of here all the ways we think you're a bald-faced liar in every aspect of your life. Just over and over and over again, you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, I was uncomfortable. I'd do this for a living.

And I was like, oh, God. that's brutal, please stop. I think it can be kind of a gamble. Like maybe the jury absorbed it or maybe they thought it was a bit much. But the picture that Musk's counsel was trying to paint was essentially this guy is not building AI for the right reasons.

Elon Musk is and Sam Altman is not. What's Altman's demeanor as these accusations are being presented to him? He tried to sort of be humble and say, I think I'm trustworthy. And then slowly, over the course of hours of questioning started to push back

and started being a little more forceful in his pushback. He certainly was not like Elon who would just throw insults right back at the lawyers or whatever, you know? And I think Altman was, you know, probably had the foresight to not come off as snippy in that regard. But I think after like hour one of getting called, you know, Satan,

he decided to start pushing back a little bit more. Is interesting how personal this all sounds. Like you said this trial feels very much about the characters of these two men. It's ostensibly about whether this company that was a nonprofit betrayed its original mission. But at a really fundamental sense, it seems to be about who these people are at their core. Yeah, totally. And I really think that's part of the point of why we've been getting into all these old emails. muckraking. It's because a lot of this trial feels kind of vibes-based at this point. You have to remember

this is a jury of nine people who are essentially trying to figure out kind of which side they trust more. Is it Elon Musk telling the truth? Is it Sam Altman? And I think each new bit of evidence being introduced is trying to sway the jury a little bit more that actually this person shouldn't be trusted. Mike, you obviously can't say all that much about the jury. and it would be unfair for me to ask you to predict what's about to happen. Thank you. But I have to ask, who do you think came out on top in the war to prove to these nine people that they are the more credible one?

No, totally. Well, can I just tell you, as I was reporting this trial, and I would get random messages from people who are trying to bet on the outcome of this trial on Kalshi and Polly Market. Okay, that's not why I'm asking. I was going to say, so I'm not telling you if that's the case. But no, also, I did not respond to any of them. But it's too hard to tell, you know.

And there's still a bunch of stuff that has to happen before we even get to a real outcome. The jury has to deliberate on the verdict itself. The judge has to decide what remedies are, depending on who wins. And I am sure there's going to be, appeals after whatever decision comes. So, Mike, setting aside who may win, what do you think the effect of this case will be?

Of all the mudslinging and the tarring and feathering of these two guys at this moment when public opinion of AI is so contested? I mean, it's not lost on me that this is all happening in a context where neither of these two men or AI in general is broadly beloved. Does it heighten the sense that people might have, the skepticism that people might have over the leaders of this hugely important industry? I mean, it certainly doesn't help

to have all these gnarly emails from the past saying really bad stuff about each other out there for public consumption. But I think you're exactly right. We're in this weird moment in Silicon Valley where everyone in AI realizes how much the average person isn't as enamored with it as they are, you know? Right. Technologies see is this is how we can do things faster and better and these jobs are going to go away,

but in service of something bigger and better. And what the average person hears out in the rest of the world is you're going to take my jobs and you're going to be richer than God and I'm going to be left with the scraps. Why would I see anything good in this? You know, whoever wins this case, there is something lost for both sides there because it's just a lot of real ugliness being dredged up for the public to see and, and judge for themselves, you know? So sure, they can say all day long that they want to get back to building, and I'm sure

that they do. But also, this is part of the game, man. This is how they chip away at each other. in this incredibly intense competitive arena around racing to build AI. Obviously, competition has always existed in this space, but it just strikes me that what you're describing right now is so different from that era in 2015 that you heard about in this trial where there was a real sense of joint mission around this.

Look, Silicon Valley has always been a competitive place, but I was actually talking to my editor the other day, and she was saying, I don't think I've ever seen it this crazy the entire time I've been reporting out here. And I agree with her. You know, like there's something different about how people are competing in this AI race, you know.

It's not just raising millions of dollars. It's tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. It's looking at your competitors and dragging their name and reputation through the mud any way you can. It's getting as much competitive intelligence on each other

so you can throw it into a lawsuit or get some nasty character assassination out there into the public. It's doing whatever you can to keep other people from investing your competitors. And you have Molotov cocktails being thrown at Sam Altman's house, for example. I mean, the public feeling about it is heightened too.

I think that's the other part of it. Like, there's the money part. And there are people who believe this is actually existential. You know, actually, the stakes are not just, I'm going to have the next cool company. It's what happens to the human race if we fail. But, look, the jury's deliberating right now. The trial is still, you know, a total up in the air thing. But I think no matter what the outcome.

of this thing is there's not really any coming back from how high stakes things are. That's just how it is out here now. Well, Mike, thanks so much. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. I have been able to participate in democracy. And when you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn't turn out the way you wanted to.

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy decisively lost his primary over the weekend after President Trump targeted him for defeat. Trump was retaliating against Cassidy for voting to impeach him for inciting insurrection after he lost the 2020 election. But you don't pout, you don't whine, you don't claim that election was stolen, you don't find a reason why. In his concession speech, Cassidy took a thinly veiled swipe at Trump, saying, America's leaders shouldn't be focused on one individual who demanded absolute loyalty. But his defeat demonstrated the strength of Trump's hold on the party. Trump's chosen candidate, Julia Letlow, finished well ahead, a former Trump official finished second, and Cassidy couldn't even secure enough support to stay in the race.

Trump celebrated the result in a social media post, saying that Cassidy's, quote, disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend. Today's episode was produced by Asthah Chatharvedi, Adrian Hurst, Shannon Lynn, and Rochelle Bonja. It was edited by Brendan Clinkinberg, with help from Paige Cowett, and contains music by Dan Powell, Marion Lazzano, and Rowan Nemistow. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the Daily.

I'm Natalie Kitroa. See you tomorrow.