OAKLAND, Calif. — A lawyer for tech billionaire Elon Musk apologized to jurors on Thursday for his client’s absence from the courtroom and asked them not to read too much into it, as closing statements began in Musk’s lawsuit against artificial intelligence startup OpenAI.
“He’s sorry that he could not be here, but I think you saw from his testimony that this is something that he’s passionate about,” said the lawyer, Steven Molo.
As a three-week blockbuster federal trial neared its end, Musk was half a world away in China, joining President Donald Trump and other U.S. business executives on an official state visit. He traveled there a day earlier, despite the trial judge having told him that he was not excused from testimony and could be recalled to the stand.
In Beijing, Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said that talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping had been “awesome.”
Musk’s lawsuit centers on OpenAI’s decision to create a for-profit arm with outside investors in order to pay for the researchers and computing power that fuel its research and its signature app, ChatGPT. Musk, a co-founder and early donor, alleges that OpenAI has betrayed its nonprofit origins, while OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, say that a nonprofit foundation still controls the organization and that Musk agreed with them about creating a for-profit arm.
Though Musk initiated the case and pushed for it to go to trial, he has not been in court for two weeks. He testified in the trial for three days but has not returned since leaving the witness stand April 30. He was not recalled to the stand during the trial’s evidence phase, which ended Wednesday.
By contrast, Altman, who is a defendant in the lawsuit, was in the courtroom Thursday to hear closing statements from Molo and other lawyers.
Molo was not specific with the jury about where Musk was, and Musk may not be done with his globe-trotting. On Monday, which is scheduled to be the jury’s first full day of deliberations, Musk is due to speak at a transportation and mobility conference in Israel.
Bill Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI and its executives, circled back to Musk’s absence when he gave a closing statement.
“Mr. Musk isn’t here. Mr. Musk came to this court for exactly one witness, himself, and he hasn’t been back since. Now, he’s in parts unknown,” he said.
In their closing statements, the lawyers in the case battled over which billionaires were the most believable as witnesses.
Molo told the jury that five witnesses under oath in the trial had called Altman a liar. He compared Altman’s track record to a rickety bridge.
“If a bridge was built on Sam Altman’s reputation for telling the truth, I don’t think you’d cross that bridge,” he said.
He also attacked Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman for getting rich off the organization, noting in particular Brockman’s nearly $30 billion stake and Altman’s investments in companies that have made deals with OpenAI.
Molo told the jurors to ignore the fact that OpenAI’s foundation arm has an even bigger stake in the for-profit side of the organization. The foundation’s stake was valued at $130 billion last year.
“If you go and rob a bank and you take $1 million from the bank, it’s not a defense to say, ‘I left $100 million in the bank,’” Molo said.
Later in the day, Savitt said that Molo’s bank robbery analogy was flawed because Altman, Brockman and other OpenAI employees created the value in question in the first place.
“Has anyone heard of a bank robbery where the bank robbers invented the bank, created $200 billion of value and put all the money into the bank?” Savitt said.
Sarah Eddy, a second lawyer for OpenAI and its executives, said that Musk was lying to the jury about his true intentions. She said there was no evidence that Musk, when he gave money to OpenAI in its early days, wanted it to remain a nonprofit, and she said Musk pushed on his own to create a for-profit arm in 2017.
“Mr. Musk is the one whose testimony is contradicted by every witness and all the documents,” she told the jury in her closing statement.
“Mr. Musk wanted to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company that he could control,” she added, noting that Musk once proposed merging OpenAI into Tesla.
Eddy also said that Musk waited too long to sue. Any complaints he’s making now, she said, he could have made as far back as 2017, when OpenAI’s co-founders discussed a pivot to being a for-profit company in order to raise money.
“In this case, the statute of limitations is not a technical defense. It’s a textbook case for why we have a statute-of-limitations defense in the first place,” she said. “He could not bring a claim even if he had one, which he doesn’t.”
