Elon Musk loses court battle against OpenAI

**Alex Ritson** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson, and in the early hours of Tuesday 19th May, these are our main stories. Elon Musk loses his legal battle with AI rival Sam Altman over whether OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, should be a charity. A week after Donald Trump's visit to China, Xi Jinping prepares to host the Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ebola is said to be spreading over a wider area, with 118 deaths now confirmed.
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He said that if I told anybody what had happened, that he would get someone to throw acid at me.

**Alex Ritson** (0:50)
Here in Britain, two women have told the BBC they were raped during the filming of one of the biggest shows on the Channel 4 TV network. Married At First Sight UK.
The world's richest man, Elon Musk, has lost his landmark case against his former business partner, Sam Altman of OpenAI. But the battle between the two tech giants didn't end after only two hours of jury deliberation because they sided with Altman, but because they agreed that Musk had waited too long to file his lawsuit, leaving all his claims essentially expired. The case could be seen as the culmination of a bitter feud between the former co-workers turned rivals, in which Elon Musk claimed Sam Altman had deceived him by shifting the ChatGPT company to a for-profit business after Musk left the venture. Afterwards Mr Musk said he would appeal, but Mr Altman's team was understandably happy. Here's his lawyer, William Savage.

**William Savage** (1:50)
Mr Musk can bring his claims and he can tell his stories.
But what the nine members of this jury found is that his stories were just that, stories, not facts. And the facts are that OpenAI is a not-for-profit mission-driven organization that has been and will continue to be faithful to that mission as it already has done.

**Alex Ritson** (2:10)
Our North America technology correspondent, Lily Jamali, was at the hearing. I asked her how the case even got this far when the jury seemed to think Mr. Musk had waited too long to go to court, or was it not so clear-cut?

**Lily Jamali** (2:23)
You know, this statute of limitations issue, which the jury ultimately decided on, didn't come up all that much during the three weeks of testimony. But OpenAI made a really big deal about it in the closing arguments. And so that's where I think a lot of us in the courtroom gallery started to think, huh, maybe that's the thing that will determine this case, we'll see. And that's exactly what the jury did. The central claims brought by Elon Musk were breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment. He had three years to file the first, two years to file the second. OpenAI said all along, you know, he had brought this case too late and that's where the jury landed ultimately. They obviously made a very persuasive case there. But in terms of why it even got to this point when this issue existed, the judge seemed to think that Musk's claims still included some triable issues. And so that's why presumably she let the case go forward.

**Alex Ritson** (3:17)
During the course of the court hearings, we've learned a lot about the two men, private emails, messages, industry, insider witnesses, etc. Which has really exposed a lot of the inner workings of Silicon Valley. Has one side come out better than the other?

**Lily Jamali** (3:31)
I think, you know, it's fair to say both sides have come out with at least some egg on their face. What we have learned is exactly as you just suggested, how power works. How does one acquire power in Silicon Valley and how does one wield it effectively? These emails between Sam Altman and Elon Musk and others from a decade ago, you get a sense from especially from Sam Altman, who was a big deal in Silicon Valley in certain circles at that time, but nowhere in the Achtelon of Fame of Fortune where Musk was at, at that point, you know, he's trying to hitch his wagon to Musk. So there you see somebody trying to gather to gain power.
You see OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman in his personal journal, trying to figure out what path makes sense that will get me to become a billionaire. That was a goal that he had. Musk, on the other hand, also clearly in the hunt for power, he wanted control over OpenAI when he wasn't getting it, when the other co-founders didn't acquiesce. He tried to starve OpenAI of resources thinking he was leaving it for dead. Lo and behold, they survive and end up sparking a consumer AI revolution with ChatGPT.