uncovering

Three weeks of testimonies, 78 messages between Sam Altman and Mira Murati during the night they were going to kill him as CEOemails where Greg Brockman wrote in his personal diary how nice it would be to “earn billions” and Satya Nadella describing the OpenAI board as ““amateur city”. This Thursday the final arguments of the Musk vs. Altman trial were held in a federal court in Oakland. The lawsuit asked for 150,000 million in damages and the dismissal of Altman. What has been left for the public has not so much to do with the verdict. Why is it important. OpenAI is, despite its name, one of the most secretive companies in Silicon Valley. Its internal functioning, until now, was known through highly selected profiles in The New Yorker or specific leaks. The trial has forced the company to publish emails, text messages, personal diaries and depositions that depict an organization very different from the one that sells its official communication. A company plagued by power struggles, mutual suspicions between founders and a board that in 2023 could not explain why it fired its own CEO. behind the scenes. The most illuminating episode occurred not on the stand, but in a chain of late-night messages between Altman and Murati during “The Blip“, the weekend of November 2023 in which the board removed the CEO. At 2:30 a.m. Monday morning, Altman was asking his then-CTO if things were going well or badly. “This is going in a very bad direction. Sam, this is very serious,” Murati responded. Minutes later, Altman offered to leave to avoid lawsuits. Murati replied that the council already had a replacement: “uncle random of Twitch”, in reference to Emmett Shear. That same day, Murati signed the first of the letters from employees asking for Altman’s return. The contrast. What Murati’s deposition leaked is that she herself had fed the board with complaints about Altman before the firing. Helen Toner, a former councillor, testified that Murati and co-founder Ilya Sutskever had conveyed to the council a pattern of behavior about Altman’s honesty. Sutskever wrote a 52-page memorandum. On the stand, Sutskever himself confirmed writing to the board that Altman “demonstrates a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his executives, and pitting them against each other.” Murati, in his deposition, maintained his criticisms but framed them as “purely managerial.” Go deeper. The term that the Microsoft leadership used to describe what they saw in those days was said by Satya Nadella from the stand: ‘amateur city. The CEO of Microsoft, the main investor in OpenAI with more than 13 billion contributed, said that he never received a concrete explanation of why Altman was fired. “I was very concerned that employees would leave en masse,” he said. Nadella offered Altman a position at Microsoft with an open invitation to the entire OpenAI team. Altman admitted at trial that he was on the verge of accepting: “I would have made a lot of money and had a much easier life at Microsoft.” He ended up coming back to OpenAI with some new advice. The outgoing board’s accusation was that Altman “had not been consistently candid” with them. The money trail. The trial has also exposed Altman’s web of personal interests in companies that do business with OpenAI. While under interrogation, Altman acknowledged stakes worth more than $2 billion in companies such as Helion Energy, Cerebras –just went public–, Reddit or Stripe. His third of Helion (from which he has just left as president) is valued at 1,650 million. OpenAI has signed a framework agreement with Helion for future energy supplies. Forbes has recalculated his assets at more than 4,000 million after these revelations. Brockman, who according to Musk “did not invest a cent”, now appears with a stake valued at 30 billion. Yes, but. None of this changes the legal background. The jury must decide on two specific civil claims: breach of fiduciary trust and unjust enrichment. Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, has tried to turn this into a trial about Altman’s credibility. In his closing arguments he put an unflattering photo of the CEO on screen and asked the jury to imagine a bridge over a ravine “built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth.” And now what. OpenAI has been preparing for a long time an IPO that could value it at close to a billion dollars. Musk, meanwhile, flew to China with Trump despite the judicial warning that he could be called to testify again. Regardless of the ruling, the reputational damage has already been done. The narrative that OpenAI has tried to project for years (that of being an idealistic laboratory guided by the mission of benefiting humanity) now coexists with another version documented in a judicial process: that of a company where the co-founder sends messages to the CEO at two in the morning to tell him that it is finished and a few hours later she signs the letter asking for her return. A company where the president wrote in his diary that “it would be nice to earn billions.” And where the reference investor, seeing the chaos from the outside, called ‘amateur city to its governing bodies. The jury’s verdict will come next week. What can no longer be archived are the documents. In Xataka | There is a thing called “Ornn price index”, it is out of control and it is bad news for everyone Featured image | Xataka