Tesla CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are set to face off in federal court next week in a high-stakes legal battle that has exposed the private dealings of Silicon Valley’s elite, according to a report by Shira Ovide and Gerrit De Vynck for The Washington Post.
The lawsuit alleges that Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman betrayed OpenAI’s founding mission as an open-source nonprofit to enrich themselves. OpenAI has countered that the suit is a “baseless” attempt by Musk to derail a competitor to his own venture, xAI.
Court filings have yielded several striking revelations:
Burning Man and “rhino ketamine”: OpenAI lawyers questioned Musk about whether 2017 negotiations coincided with his attendance at the Burning Man festival. Depositions included inquiries into “rhino ketamine,” a hallucinogenic cocktail. The legal team introduced the topic of ketamine to argue that Musk’s recollection of the negotiations regarding the company’s transition from its nonprofit status might be compromised by a potential “lapse in memory” occurring during his attendance at the festival. While a judge barred drug references from the trial, she ruled that Musk’s attendance at the festival is relevant to his memory of the period.
The internal informant: Shivon Zilis, an OpenAI board member who has four children with Musk, allegedly acted as a “whisperer” for him. OpenAI claims Zilis secretly fed Musk information to support his claims against the company while she was serving on its board.
Billionaire feuds: Messages show Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg offering to help Musk with content moderation regarding his federal efficiency project. In a 2016 email to Altman regarding negotiations for AI computing power, Musk insulted Jeff Bezos as “a bit of a tool” to explain his preference for Microsoft over Amazon, a sentiment he later reaffirmed during a September 2024 deposition.
Wealth motivations: Personal journals revealed Brockman agonizing over whether to align with Musk or Altman, and though he questioned, «Financially what will take me to $1B?» while weighing a for-profit transition, he also noted that excluding Musk would be “morally bankrupt” and later testified his primary motivation remained the company’s mission.
