Today marked the commencement of the Musk v. Altman trial, with Elon Musk taking the stand as the inaugural witness. Contrary to past appearances, Musk’s demeanor seemed subdued and uninspired.

Having observed Musk in legal settings before, such as during his defamation case, his ability to engage and sway a jury was apparent, leading to a favorable verdict. However, during this hearing, Musk appeared disconnected and underprepared. His most animated moments came when he boasted about his contributions to OpenAI.

The direct examination session typically serves to weave a coherent narrative through targeted questioning. Yet, in this case concerning allegations against Sam Altman for deviating from OpenAI’s intended path, Musk surprisingly focused on himself, detailing his background and promoting his unrelated business accomplishments.

He also shared with the jury his grueling work schedule, claiming to clock in between “80 to 100 hours a week,” attributing this to his productivity. Whether his frequent social media activity is part of this calculation remains ambiguous, leaving room for the defense to probe further.

We did eventually get around to OpenAI, where Musk portrayed himself as the driving force. He’d been worried about AI since childhood, and who had finally felt that someone needed to prevent Google from developing it. He testified that he became involved in AI safety because he had a conversation with Google’s own Larry Page and asked, “What if AI wipes out all the humans?” Page essentially shrugged — as far as he was concerned, as long as the AI didn’t also go extinct, things were all right. “I said, ‘That’s insane,’ and he called me a species-ist for being pro-human.” So OpenAI, for Musk, was born specifically to keep Google from having too much power in AI. Petty! Musk also said that after he recruited Ilya Sutskever, then a research scientist at Google, to OpenAI that “Larry Page refused to speak to me ever again.”

What did Musk do at OpenAI? “I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people. taught them everything I know, provided all the initial funding. Besides that, nothing.” He paused for laughter, and one or two people obligingly chuckled. But most of the courtroom was silent. I thought he sounded petulant. “I could have started it as a for-profit and I chose not to,” Musk said.

I do wonder how much of this the jury is following. We went very quickly through a lot of ideas, including “artificial general intelligence,” an imaginary thing that many AI researchers are nonetheless afraid of. Musk defined this as being when a computer “becomes as smart as any human, arguably smarter than any human.” (Large language models are not the same as intelligence, and AGI has been defined downward for quite some time. But whatever! This case is not about that!)

At another point, Musk was asked to explain who former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis was. “Shivon was the, um, my chief of staff and, uh, you know,” Musk said. One person in the gallery — presumably familiar with the fact that Zilis is the mother of a few of Musk’s kids — burst out in loud laughter. But the jury looked puzzled.

During discussions of how best to get OpenAI the vast amounts of funding it would need for compute, there was indeed discussion of a for-profit arm of OpenAI with Musk. The strategy here, I think, was to make clear that Musk’s intentions were very different than the for-profit that came to pass. (That’s true! He did not get 55 percent equity in it, as one possible cap table suggested he should.) This all seemed pretty mushy, and we got bogged down in a discussion of what, in Musk’s opinion, a reasonable equity split between founders and funders would be; it’s hard to preempt the argument you are expecting without making it yourself.

This is also kind of a distraction from the core point of the trial: Did OpenAI betray its mission statement and fool Musk into making a charitable donation? I agreed to a for-profit model but not THAT for-profit model isn’t a strong argument.

We’ll be back with more Musk testimony and presumably his cross-examination. If there’s a clearer story from the defense, this trial is effectively all over but the shouting. I’ve seen a strong performance from Musk on the stand before. Today he just didn’t seem dialed in. Maybe he’s grumpy about this trial because he knows he’s wasting his own time.