On Thursday afternoon, in a federal courthouse a short drive from the Bay Bridge, a lawyer named Steven Molo asked a jury of nine ordinary Californians a strange question. Would you cross a wooden bridge, he said, suspended 150 feet above a gorge, if it had been built on Sam Altman's version of the truth?
It was the last sentence of three weeks of testimony in the most consequential courtroom drama the AI industry has ever seen — Musk v. Altman, the case in which Elon Musk has accused Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of "stealing a charity" by turning OpenAI from a research nonprofit into a company recently valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. On paper, the dispute is about roughly $38 million in donations Musk made between 2015 and 2017. In reality, it has become something much bigger.
It has become a referendum on whether one of the most powerful CEOs in the world can be believed when he speaks.
The jury begins deliberating tomorrow. And looming over every closing argument was a twelve-word sentence that Altman's old board wrote about him back in 2023 — words that, two and a half years later, may decide whether he keeps his job.
