Elizabeth Lopatto
Microsoft and OpenAI rest.
There is no rebuttal case from Musk’s team. We will get closing statements tomorrow.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Senior Reporter
Senior Reporter
Elizabeth Lopatto is a senior writer at The Verge, where she covers how the internet is changing how we think about money: cryptocurrency, business, fintech and Elon Musk for some reason. She joined the site in 2014, as science editor, then deputy editor running science, transportation and social media, before she got tired of being an authority figure and went back to blogging.
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Elizabeth Lopatto
In the most boring expert testimony yet, Louis Dudney, a forensic accountant, testified about how those funds were spent.
It was on “functional expsenses,” ie, salaries, compute, etc. The cross is just arguing about the methodology of accounting for commingled money in the donated accounts. I can’t believe we are having a methodology dispute about this. I may die.
Elizabeth Lopatto
The shade we are getting in here is incredible.
John Coates noted that he’s worked for a lot of law firms as an expert witness, including Quinn Emanuel, Musk’s primary firm — and not the one trying the case today. He is excused. The judge is now huddling in sidebar with the primary lawyers for the case, and an animated discussion is taking place.
Elizabeth Lopatto
The cross is focusing on Coates’ pay.
Also, he apparently has worked as an expert witness on a few Twitter cases, including the one where Musk tried to get out of buying Twitter. Incidentally, OpenAI’s lawyers are also the ones who made Musk buy Twitter. Is that deliberate shade? Who can say.
Elizabeth Lopatto
John Coates, OpenAI’s expert witness, is running a demolition derby on Musk’s expert witness.
Some highlights:
- (while looking at a chart that the plaintiffs showed the jury) I paraphrase but: I don’t know how he thought his slide was a fair representation of anything, much less reality
- “If he’s saying [the nonprofit] would own more of the for-profit if they hadn’t taken outside investment, that’s true, but then the pie would have been significantly smaller.” Coates would prefer 30 percent of a $200 billion than “a much larger share of a much smaller pie.”
- The nonprofit has “benefitted enormously” from the for-profit “so I don’t understand his argument.”
Elizabeth Lopatto
Museum gift shop metaphor found dead in a ditch.
So during the opening statements, Musk’s lawyers said that a for-profit like a museum gift shop shouldn’t be bigger than a nonprofit, like a museum. We are now hearing from Daniel Hemel, OpenAI’s expert witness. Guess what? Museum gift shops generally aren’t for-profit; they’re part of the nonprofit. Also, OpenAI’s for-profit isn’t ancillary to the nonprofit — it’s how the nonprofit pursues its mission, like with the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corportation.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Achiam is running circles around this lawyer on cross, without doing the annoying things other witnesses have done.
She quotes a tweet of his saying that he believes Musk was doing his best for humanity. He asks when that was. She says, January 2025. He says, well he’s done some things that undermined my confidence since then.
There’s a brief redirect, and then Achiam steps down. No trophy for the jury. :(
Elizabeth Lopatto
Okay, it’s time for the cross of Achiam.
“Are you aware that OpenAI employees are better-compensated than any other employees in startup history?” lol lady, why would he know that. Anyway, he’s got millions of dollars in OpenAI shares, and he’s also sold some for more than $10 million.
Elizabeth Lopatto
“I think he was just upset that he had been challenged,” Achiam said. “This was not friendly.”
In Musk’s testimony, he claimed he might have said something friendly like “don’t be a jackass” but denied he’d called anyone a jackass. Achiam’s testimony obviously contradicts that. Achiam received a trophy from Dario Amodei at the next meeting in commemoration of Achiam standing up to Musk: “Never stop being a jackass for safety.” The trophy is not introduced, sadly for me.
Elizabeth Lopatto
During the all-hands, Musk expressed concerns about what would happen if DeepMind got to AGI first,
“It sounded like he wanted to race toward AGI.” That sounded unsafe to Achiam. “He was proposing to do something that seemed, based on our understanding at the time, obviously unsafe and reckless,” Achiam said. “We had a pretty tense exchange, and he snapped and called me a jackass.” There were 50 or 60 people at that meeting.