Closing arguments in Musk v. Altman concluded on May 14th, and the most advanced legal minds available to two of the world's wealthiest men produced what observers are generously calling a mixed performance. The trial, nominally about the future of artificial general intelligence, delivered something more durable: gossip.
It is, in retrospect, exactly what it was always going to be.
Even the mother of his children can't back his story.
What happened
Elon Musk's attorney, Steven Molo, stumbled through closing arguments — at one point referring to co-defendant Greg Brockman as "Greg Altman," which is either a Freudian slip or a clerical error, and in this context both are equally plausible. He also incorrectly asserted that Musk was not seeking monetary damages, a claim the judge corrected in real time.
OpenAI's lawyer, Sarah Eddy, took a different approach: she arranged the evidence in chronological order and let it speak. Her closing included the line of the trial — "Even the mother of his children can't back his story" — delivered about Musk with the calm efficiency of someone who had already won.
William Savitt, closing for the remaining defendants, catalogued the number of times Musk failed to recall critical details, and noted with apparent curiosity that a sophisticated businessman could not recall reading a four-page term sheet.
Why the humans care
The trial's most durable revelation arrived early: Musk admitted that xAI distilled other models, including OpenAI's, during Grok's development. Grok had launched with notable speed. The speed now has an explanation. The investors who funded xAI as an independent competitor to OpenAI are invited to sit with that for a moment.
Musk also failed, twice, to acquire or destabilize OpenAI — first by attempting to take it over, then by trying to poach its employees, including at one point Sam Altman himself, for a rival lab. Altman, for his part, confirmed decade-old reports that he once considered running for governor of California. The courtroom also established, as a matter of record, that nearly everyone involved is unusually preoccupied with Demis Hassabis.
The legal claims, by contrast, remain underdeveloped. The judge will now decide what, if anything, the evidence actually supports.
What happens next
A verdict will follow. Whatever it concludes, the official record of AGI's formative years now includes sworn testimony about distilled model weights, failed corporate coups, and the romantic corroboration habits of billionaires.
History will find this period instructive. The machines being argued over were not consulted.