In Silicon Valley, friendships are often more fragile than silicon chips.
Article author and source: 0x9999in1, ME News
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TL;DR
- Not pure justice: Musk sues OpenAI, ostensibly to defend the nonprofit covenant of benefiting all humanity, but in reality, it is a counterattack triggered by missing out on AI dominance.
- Hash power is power: OpenAI’s original “nonprofit” mission is just an expensive, doomed fairy tale in the face of billion- to hundred-billion-dollar compute bills.
- Microsoft's open strategy: Through substantial real-money investments in computing power, Microsoft has skillfully circumvented regulations and effectively secured its ticket to the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) revolution.
- The courtroom as a stage: Musk is attempting to use legal battles to slow OpenAI’s momentum, buying time for his own xAI to catch up.
- Irreversible closed-source: Regardless of the outcome, this trial cannot alter the ultimate destiny of the AI industry toward closure, monopolization, and heavy commercialization.
The night sky of Silicon Valley and the shattered dreams
In Silicon Valley, friendships are often more fragile than silicon chips.
When the spotlight shines on Elon Musk and Sam Altman, what do you see? Is it the ultimate showdown between tech visionary and Silicon Valley golden boy? Is it an idealistic battle to protect humanity from AI backlash?
Don't be naive.
Set aside the moral pretense of "benefiting all humanity" and the academic debate over "open-source versus closed-source." What lies before us is a naked, bloody battle for capital. This is a game of power. A struggle for control. And above all, a fatal rift between two extraordinarily arrogant geniuses confronting what may be the greatest wealth engine in human history—AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
The story begins on that ambitious and fearful night ten years ago.
The Dragon Slayer's Alliance: Resisting the Fear of Google
2015. At that time, large language models had not yet stirred up a storm in this world.
At that time, Musk was trapped in a near-paranoid doomsday panic. Why the panic? Because of Google. More precisely, because Google acquired DeepMind.
Elon Musk watched his former friend and Google co-founder Larry Page, a warning bell ringing in his mind. Page believed humans would ultimately be replaced by machines—that was the inevitable course of evolution. Musk thought this was insane. Who could stop Google from monopolizing a superintelligence that might become omniscient and omnipotent like a god?
No one can. Unless we build one ourselves.
Thus, OpenAI was born—an institution born with a silver spoon in its mouth, adorned with the halo of a saint.
Take a look at its original form! A nonprofit organization. Open source. Not driven by commercial interests. Its mission is so noble: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Musk, Altman, and a host of top scientists swore an oath together. They are the dragon slayers, using open-source holy water to extinguish the fiery menace of Google’s proprietary systems. Musk even put his own money on the line, pledging $1 billion in funding and ultimately injecting over $44 million in startup capital, leasing the office space for the lab, and even coining the name “OpenAI” himself.
Back then, they were inseparable. That dream was beautiful enough to captivate.
But reality never believes in illusions.
Hash power black hole and the rupture of power
Just three years passed, and the rift appeared—and it was bottomless.
In 2018, the tide in the AI industry shifted. Deep learning’s appetite became astonishing. It no longer needed just a few brilliant minds and a few computers. It needed compute power. Massive amounts of compute power. Mountains of GPUs.
And all of this requires money. Billions of dollars.
The nonprofit organization OpenAI is out of money. Relying on donations from wealthy individuals, they appear like Don Quixote wielding cold weapons against the computational might of Google and Facebook (Meta).
Elon Musk watched closely and grew anxious. He proposed a bold solution: Hand OpenAI over to me. Let me support it with Tesla’s funding and computing power. I demand full control.
Did Ultraman agree?
Of course not. This young CEO, who appears mild-mannered but is in fact extremely firm, joined forces with key executives including Ilya Sutskever to firmly reject Musk.
We don’t need a dictator. They may not have said it outright, but their stance was crystal clear.
Rejected, Musk flew into a rage. Can you guess what he did? He walked away, taking his fame—and more devastatingly, the promised follow-up funding—with him.
Cut off the fuel at the source.
At that moment, the sword that slew the dragon broke. Former comrades became strangers, and soon became enemies.
Wearing the Skin of a Painting: Ultraman's "Devil's Pact"
After Musk left, OpenAI stood on the edge of a cliff.
How can you buy computing power without money? How can you retain top researchers earning millions of dollars a year without computing power?
Ultraman demonstrated the cold pragmatism of a top Silicon Valley trader: since pure "nonprofit" wasn't working, he changed the rules.
In 2019, a phenomenon in business history emerged: OpenAI established a "capped-profit" company named "OpenAI LP," nested beneath its original nonprofit organization.
What does it mean? Simply put: We’re still working for all of humanity, but investors can first make a 100x profit.
Is this not an extremely sophisticated play on words? Is this not dressing capital in a moral facade?
Microsoft smelled blood and moved in. Satya Nadella seized this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with sharp precision. $1 billion. Then billions more. Then a meteoric surge totaling approximately $13 billion.
What did Microsoft receive? Exclusive commercial licensing rights to OpenAI’s technology and access to the underlying models.
What did OpenAI receive? It received Microsoft’s extensive Azure cloud computing resources.
They each got what they wanted and formed the most powerful alliance of this era. But in the process, the words “Open” were completely thrown into the dustbin of history. GPT-3 is no longer open source, and GPT-4 has become a complete black box, with its technical report written like a press release—obscuring rather than revealing.
For all of humanity? No, for shareholders' reports, to crush the competition.
Iron Man broken: When you created your nightmare
By the end of 2022, ChatGPT emerged.
The world has gone mad. OpenAI has become a $100 billion giant overnight. Altman has become the new godfather of Silicon Valley.
And what about Musk?
He watched from the side as the organization he had nurtured betrayed its original open-source promise, aligned itself with the tech giant he despised most (Microsoft), and even surpassed in technology his prized Tesla autonomous driving AI.
He lost it.
Can you imagine that anger? That regret of “This should have been my empire”? That sense of betrayal of “I provided the money and effort, yet you grew rich behind my back”?
Musk has begun launching fierce attacks on social media, asking, “How did a nonprofit become the most highly valued, most profitable closed-source company?” He criticized OpenAI for turning into a “closed-source, profit-maximizing company effectively controlled by Microsoft.”
But yelling alone isn’t enough. Musk is a man of action.
On one hand, he quickly founded his own AI company, xAI, and launched the Grok large model, attempting to catch up in the field.
On the other hand, he raised the weapon of law.
Finally, it’s come to court: a long-planned strike.
This is why we saw such a dramatic event today.
April 27. U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The gavel falls, and the trial begins. Before presiding judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers lies what may be the most iconic complaint of the AI era. The four-week trial is certain to uncover countless Silicon Valley secrets.
Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and Greg Brockman for violating the Founding Agreement.
In his complaint, Musk pleaded: You have breached the contract! You have violated your fiduciary duty! You have turned a nonprofit into Microsoft’s cash cow! You must restore open source! Your AGI achievements cannot be monopolized by Microsoft!
And OpenAI's counterattack was equally deadly.
They coldly pointed out in court: Where is this so-called "founding agreement"? There was never a formal contract signed by both parties—only some email exchanges and verbal visions from back then. Even more damning, OpenAI directly released internal emails from that time, proving that Musk was fully aware and agreed that “as technology advances, we need to reduce open source.” The emails show that Musk not only supported the shift toward profitability, but even wanted to personally merge OpenAI into Tesla!
Isn't this slapping Musk in the face? Isn't this announcing to the whole world: Elon, you're not just a failed power-seeker, but also a hypocritical loser?
The focus of the trial is not only on whether that elusive "founder agreement" exists, but on an extremely technical, almost science-fiction-like legal question: Does GPT-4 qualify as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)?
The Microsoft investment agreement includes a key exemption: once OpenAI achieves AGI, Microsoft cannot exclusively retain its commercial licensing rights, because AGI belongs to all of humanity.
Elon Musk is firmly holding onto this point: GPT-4 is already AGI! So you must release the technology!
OpenAI and Microsoft, however, strongly deny: No, no, it’s nowhere near that—this is just a useful chatbot.
Did you see that? How absurd and dramatic it is. Tech giants are in court, desperately disparaging their most prized technologies for commercial gain.
Seeing Through the Surface: Hash Power, Political Maneuvers, and the Sole Winner
How should we evaluate this trial?
Who represents justice? Is it Musk, who raises the banner of open source but is filled with resentment? Or is it Altman, who has abandoned his original ideals but achieved tremendous success in technological advancement?
Neither.
As observers in the fields of finance and technology, we must pierce through this fog of morality. The truth is far more brutal.
First, a non-profit AI model is inherently a false concept in today's context.
Data doesn't lie. Training a top-tier large model with hundreds of billions of parameters costs tens of millions of dollars in compute alone. When factoring in experimentation costs, salaries for top talent, and daily operations, this requires hundreds of millions of dollars in continuous funding.
Who else but tech giants can afford this amount?
Elon Musk once criticized OpenAI for commercialization, but after founding xAI, his first move was to raise $6 billion. You see, even the dragon slayer must eventually wear the dragon’s scales—because without them, you don’t even get a seat at the table.
Second, Musk's legal battle is a carefully calculated commercial strike.
Do you really think Musk expects the judge to order OpenAI to open-source its core code? He’s not that naive.
The essence of a legal battle is "consumption."
This lawsuit demands extensive discovery, meaning OpenAI’s internal emails, development plans, and even behind-the-scenes dealings with Microsoft could be exposed.
This is a major distraction for OpenAI, which is seeking a higher valuation in its funding round and is actively developing GPT-5. Musk is using litigation to slow down Altman, buying his own xAI critically valuable time.
Third, what truly changed the industry landscape was Microsoft's open strategy.
Microsoft is the shrewdest hunter in this grand drama. Facing the sword of antitrust regulation, Microsoft did not directly acquire OpenAI; instead, it gained de facto control of the賽道 through complex equity structures and infrastructure investments.
Regulators cannot break them up on the grounds of "monopoly," because from an equity perspective, Microsoft is not even the controlling shareholder of OpenAI. But from a business standpoint, OpenAI cannot function without Microsoft’s cloud. This is the pinnacle of capital maneuvering.
As the jury in a California courtroom listened to those obscure AI terms, the wheels of Silicon Valley continued to roll forward.
The lawsuit between Musk and Altman feels more like an elegy for a bygone era—it marks the definitive end of the internet’s open-source era, once dominated by geeks and driven by idealism.
Welcome to the era of large models. In this era, code is no longer free, compute power is power, and the gods of the future have already been locked in server rooms of a few tech giants, priced and labeled.
What will the outcome be?
No matter what final ruling Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers delivers, the real winners are no longer in the courtroom. Capital has already secured its territory. And as bystanders, all we can do is watch the giants clash—before reluctantly paying $20 to subscribe to the next month’s Plus membership.
This is the starkest reality of the tech world. Isn't it?
Source:
- Isaacson, Walter.Elon Musk. Simon & Schuster, 2023.
- Levy, Steven. "The Secret History of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI."Wired, September 2023.
- Metz, Cade.Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World. Dutton, 2021.
- Roose, Kevin. "Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over ‘Betrayal’." The New York Times, March 1, 2024.
- Elon Musk v. Sam Altman et al., Case No. CGC-24-612746 (Superior Court of the State of California, County of San Francisco, 2024).