Altman was fully in “nice kid from St. Louis” mode, and did a passable impression of a man who was bewildered at what was happening to him. When he stepped down from the stand holding a stack of evidence binders, he even looked a little like a schoolboy. He seemed nervous at the beginning of his direct testimony, though he warmed up fairly quickly. Overall, he seemed to give credible testimony — and at times, it seemed like the jury liked him.

Throughout this trial I’ve had some difficulty imagining what the jury is making of all this because I am a little too familiar with the figures who are testifying. I have heard some audacious lies under oath, like when Elon Musk told us all he doesn’t lose his temper. (He then proceeded to lose his temper on cross-examination.) Or like when Shivon Zilis, the mother of several of his children, told us that she didn’t know Musk was starting xAI — which seemed to be directly contradicted by her text messages. Or when Greg “What will take me to $1B?” Brockman told us he was all about the mission. I certainly believe Altman isn’t trustworthy — I mean, The New Yorker published more than 17,000 words about how much he lies. But unlike with Musk, there are contemporaneous documents backing Altman’s version of the story. At least, mostly.

After OpenAI’s Dota 2 win, discussions for a for-profit arm started in earnest. “Mr. Musk felt very strongly that if we were going to form a for-profit he needed to have total control over it initially,” Altman said. “He only trusted himself to make non-obvious decisions that were going to turn out to be correct.”

Altman testified that he was uncomfortable with Musk’s insistence on control, not just because Musk hadn’t been as involved as everyone else, but because OpenAI existed so no one person would control AGI. And at Y Combinator, the startup incubator where he was president, Altman had seen a lot of control fights; no one wanted to give up power when things were going well. With structures like supervoting shares, founders could retain control forever. Curiously, Altman’s example was not the most famous one (Mark Zuckerberg at Meta); it was Musk and SpaceX. When Altman asked Musk about succession plans for OpenAI, he got a particularly “hair-raising” answer: In the event of Musk’s death, Musk said, “I haven’t thought about it a ton, but maybe control should pass to my children.”