Musk Vs Altman Trial Tests What Compute Economics Already Decided
Jury selection began in the Musk v. Altman trial in Oakland, with $134 billion in damages at stake, questioning OpenAI's restructure from a nonprofit to a public benefit corporation. The case tests whether OpenAI's evolution was legally allowed, despite capital already answering this question through massive investments in AI.
The Musk v. Altman trial began in Oakland, with significant damages and OpenAI's planned IPO at stake. The case centers on whether OpenAI was legally allowed to restructure from a 2015 nonprofit into a capped-profit subsidiary in 2019 and then a public benefit corporation in 2025. OpenAI's 2024 compute spend is estimated in the mid-single-digit billions, and the Stargate consortium has committed $500 billion over four years to build AI capacity. The restructure capitalized the OpenAI Foundation, giving it a 26% stake worth $130 billion. Former OpenAI researchers have since founded new companies with different structures, such as Anthropic and xAI, indicating that the compute economics question has already been answered.
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