【AI前沿】Sam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enough

AIOpenAISam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enoughElon Musk may have done more long-term reputational damage to the OpenAI CEO.byElizabeth LopattoMay 12, 2026, 11:23 PM UTCLinkShareGiftWho, me?| Image: The Verge; Getty ImagesAIOpenAISam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enoughElon Musk may have done more long-term reputational damage to the OpenAI CEO.byElizabeth LopattoMay 12, 2026, 11:23 PM UTCLinkShareGiftPart OfLive updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s court battle over the future of OpenAIsee all updatesElizabeth Lopattois a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg.After two weeks of hearing from assorted witnesses that he was a lying snake, the jury finally heard from the lying snake himself: Sam Altman. At the end of the testimony, his lawyer William Savitt asked him how it felt to be accused of stealing a charity.“We created, through a ton of hard work, this extremely large charity, and I agree you can’t steal it,” Altman said. “Mr. Musk did try to kill it, I guess. Twice.”Musk v. AltmanA free, limited-run newsletter about the biggest moments from the Musk v. Altman trial.Email (required)Sign UpBy submitting your email, you agree to ourTermsandPrivacy Notice.This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the GooglePrivacy PolicyandTerms of Serviceapply.Altman was fully in “nice kid from St. Louis” mode, and did a passable impression of a man who was bewildered at what was happening to him. When he stepped down from the stand holding a stack of evidence binders, he even looked a little like a schoolboy. He seemed nervous at the beginning of his direct testimony, though he warmed up fairly quickly. Overall, he seemed to give credible testimony — and at times, it seemed like the jury liked him.Throughout this trial I’ve had some difficulty imagining what the jury is making of all this because I am a little too familiar with the figures who are testifying. I have heard some audacious lies under oath, like whenElon Musktold us all he doesn’t lose his temper. (He then proceeded to lose his temper on cross-examination.) Or like whenShivon Zilis, the mother of several of his children, told us that she didn’t know Musk was starting xAI — which seemed to be directly contradicted by her text messages. Or whenGreg “What will take me to $1B?” Brockmantold us he was all about the mission. I certainly believe Altman isn’t trustworthy — I mean,The New Yorkerpublished more than 17,000 words about how much he lies. But unlike with Musk, there are contemporaneous documents backing Altman’s version of the story. At least, mostly.“My belief is he wanted to have long-term control”After OpenAI’sDota 2win, discussions for a for-profit arm started in earnest. “Mr. Musk felt very strongly that if we were going to form a for-profit he needed to have total control over it initially,” Altman said. “He only trusted himself to make non-obvious decisions that were going to turn out to be correct.”Altman testified that he was uncomfortable with Musk’s insistence on control, not just because Musk hadn’t been as involved as everyone else, but because OpenAI existed so no one person would control AGI. And at Y Combinator, the startup incubator where he was president, Altman had seen a lot of control fights; no one wanted to give up power when things were going well. With structures like supervoting shares, founders could retain control forever. Curiously, Altman’s example was not the most famous one (Mark Zuckerberg at Meta); it was Musk and SpaceX. When Altman asked Musk about succession plans for OpenAI, he got a particularly “hair-raising” answer: In the event of Musk’s death, Musk said, “I haven’t thought about it a ton, but maybe control should pass to my children.”I don’t know about that. But I do know that I saw a 2017 email from Altman to Zilis in which he wrote, “I am worried about control. I don’t think any one person should have control of the world’s first AGI — in fact the whole reason we started OpenAI was so that wouldn’t happen.” He went on to say that he didn’t mind the idea of immediate control and was open to “creative structures” — which I understood to mean that, in order to placate Musk, Altman was willing to give him control up to specific milestones in company development.“I read a vague, like, a lightweight threat in there”“My belief is he wanted to have long-term control and that he would’ve had that had we agreed to the structure he wanted,” Altman said on the stand. This sounds basically right. In later video testimony from Sam Teller’s deposition, we heard that Musk no longer invests in anything he doesn’t control. This also fits with Musk’s long-term fixation on making sure he can’t get booted from his own company the way he got booted from PayPal.Musk also tried to recruit Altman to Tesla. We saw texts between Altman and Teller, in which Teller told Altman tha