Musk Lost to OpenAI, but the Trial Exposed What Had Been Kept Quiet for 11 Years

A solo ToTheMoon episode about Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI. Alexander Volchek starts with the outcome: the court in California ruled that Musk had come too late, his suit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Microsoft failed on timing, and legally that is a win for OpenAI. But the trial brought far more into the open — allegations that Altman was not trusted inside the company, Brockman's diaries about money and the mission, Ilya Sutskever's testimony and Microsoft's role. OpenAI began as a nonprofit for humanity, and today the market discusses it as a potential AI empire valued in the trillions of dollars; the host himself believes it will be worth more than ten trillion.

The jury found that the suit had been filed too late, which does not mean the moral claims against OpenAI have gone away: testimony surfaced in court about distrust of Altman, a conflict of interest and internal chaos. For investors the path to an IPO became simpler, although Anthropic, the host says, is also heading for an IPO and apparently plans it earlier than OpenAI, and there is talk of major conflicts between Altman and the chief financial officer. The four leaders in America — Google Gemini, Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI — are incredibly intertwined, and the host calls Microsoft the quiet winner: without it OpenAI would not have scaled much in the first place, even though its story looks like a corporate capture of infrastructure.

To break the myth that OpenAI is Musk's company or Altman's company, the host recalls the special episode with Max Grigoriev: OpenAI came out of Google, Anthropic split off from OpenAI, and xAI is the story of Musk, who took part in creating OpenAI like no one else and, by one account, changed his mind sharply after a meeting with Sergey Brin, who said that developing AI mattered more to him than humanity. In 2015 OpenAI was announced as a nonprofit research organization for the benefit of all humanity; the key people were Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. In 2017 it became clear that AGI would need billions of dollars, and, according to OpenAI, Musk wanted a majority stake, control of the board and the CEO role in the commercial structure — the company could not hand absolute control to one person, and in 2018 he left.

From there the chronology runs through the for-profit arm of 2019 with capped investor returns, the mass-market ChatGPT and the developer API of 2022–2023, and the crisis of November 2023, when the board fired Altman. The new structure of October 2025 divided the company as follows: Microsoft 27%, former employees and investors 47%, the OpenAI Foundation 26%. In April–May 2026, at the trial in Oakland, Musk tried to prove that OpenAI had violated its original mission. Along the way the host adds a note on scale: AI users worldwide number a billion or a billion and a half, while the people who seriously understand these systems are tens of millions, or perhaps a million at most.

The parties' positions are weighed by their strength and their weakness. Musk: OpenAI was created as a mission for humanity and was turned into a commercial structure — the company really has changed radically since 2015, but Musk himself discussed a commercial structure, wanted control, and now owns a competing ecosystem, xAI, which the host calls a very serious organization. OpenAI: without the commercial structure, Microsoft, compute and investors there would have been no ChatGPT, and the money invested in the US and China is something nobody else — neither Russia nor Europe — can afford today; the weak spot is that when stakes worth tens of billions appear around the mission, the audience asks whether it is still for humanity.

Altman: the mission was not betrayed but scaled, and under him OpenAI became the world's main AI product, but the trial dragged out former colleagues' claims about his honesty and management style. Brockman: the team put in years of work after Musk left, and OpenAI could not be handed to one person, yet his stake is estimated at tens of billions of dollars and the diaries make the story about the mission less honest. Microsoft: "we did not capture the mission, we paid for the infrastructure and took a huge risk", without Azure and its capital OpenAI would not have scaled, but Microsoft, more than anyone, feeds the fear that infrastructure depends on a few corporations — although Gemini depends just as much on Google, Anthropic on a few people, and xAI on Musk.

The main turning point, in the host's words, is about greed, compute and infrastructure. Musk lost the case but continues a public war — his line is not legal technique but moral accusation, and endless lawsuits, in the host's view, lie ahead. Altman won as CEO but had to prove in public that he can be trusted; the problems with him were discussed inside OpenAI, Mira Murati among others. Microsoft looked at all of this as business, and the host believes it is losing the AI race badly and that Musk's Macrohard project undermines its future; at the same time OpenAI of 2015 and of 2026 are different organizations, and there is an upside in that — fewer conflicts and more good products.

Society has no voice in the control of AGI: models are increasingly closed off from ordinary people, and even the host cannot set aside ten or twenty thousand dollars of compute for a task of his own. The honest formula of the trial: Musk lost not because OpenAI is morally impeccable but because he came too late in legal terms; OpenAI won because it proved that the commercial turn had been discussed for a long time. Musk has his own AI empire and a fight for control through xAI, Altman a fight for his own control and questions of trust, Brockman is the darkest horse of the trial, Microsoft holds an infrastructural power it is losing, and society has almost no place in the decisions. Hence the closing question: if AGI becomes the world's new infrastructure, who should govern it — a foundation, a corporation, Microsoft, the founders, the investors, the state, or all of us?

The episode's value is that it does not pick a side: the legal outcome — "too late" — is kept apart from the moral claims, and every position, from Musk's to Microsoft's, is weighed by its strength and its weakness. The main shift the host records is that the argument about the mission has become an argument about capital and compute, and in a structure made of a foundation, a corporation, investors and founders there is no place for the society all of it was started for. He leaves the question of who should govern AGI open, but shows that it will be decided by those who hold the money and the infrastructure.