Watching Elon Musk fulminate at Bill Savitt during Musk v. Altman — the case in which Musk sued Sam Altman and OpenAI instead of seeing a therapist about his AI failures — was a bit like watching a toddler have a temper tantrum at his nursery school teacher. Savitt’s questions were “designed to trick me,” Musk said. He also told Savitt at one point, “You mostly do unfair questions.”

Savitt, who has the approximate demeanor of a handsome Droopy Dog, gently told Musk, “I am trying to put the questions as fairly as I can. I am doing my best.”

I’ve seen a number of styles of cross-examination. Savitt’s was mild-mannered and soft-spoken; his questions were mostly easy to answer, sometimes simply asking Musk to restate things he’d said in direct examination earlier that day. That Musk mysteriously could no longer remember what he’d happily told his own lawyer went a long way toward establishing Musk as an unreliable narrator from the jump — since Musk was the first witness on the stand.

“If you read the Wall Street Journal, you might as well be looking at Bill Savitt’s daily calendar.”

Savitt’s handled a number of important cases — representing Coinbase in its fight against the Securities and Exchange Commission, KKR in the (important to merger and acquisition nerds) Corwin v. KKR Financial, and Sotheby’s in its defense of a poison pill. “If you read the Wall Street Journal, you might as well be looking at Bill Savitt’s daily calendar,” wrote legal publisher Lawdragon in 2015. But his run-ins with Musk have put him on the map for a wider audience.

While Savitt had some business with Tesla in the past — Savitt’s firm, Wachtell, Lipton, represented Tesla in its SolarCity acquisition and resulting litigation — he hadn’t dealt directly with Musk, he told me. But when Musk tried to back out of his agreement to buy Twitter, Savitt represented Twitter. He won. And with Musk v. Altman, he’s won again.