The OpenAI lawsuit became a master class in what not to put in writing

Elon Musk’s loss in his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, decided on Monday by a jury and upheld by a judge, wasn’t the only damaging revelation to emerge from the California courtroom. The two-week trial also punctured the carefully managed public images of some of the most prominent figures shaping AI for hundreds of millions of people. Whether it was Musk’s combative texts to Altman threatening to make “[Altman and Brockman] the most hated men in America” if OpenAI refused to settle, co-defendant Greg Brockman’s painfully earnest diary entries about becoming a billionaire (“Financially, what will take me to $1B?”), or Mira Murati’s anxious messages to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as OpenAI’s boardroom coup unraveled , executives who had spent years projecting total control were revealed to be far more human, and far messier, than they intended. (Microsoft owns a 27% stake in OpenAI.) The case was “a reminder that discovery can be the real trial. In this case, hundreds of emails,