{"id":285921,"date":"2026-04-30T09:37:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T14:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=285921"},"modified":"2026-04-30T07:42:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T12:42:07","slug":"when-the-worst-person-you-know-makes-a-good-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2026\/04\/30\/when-the-worst-person-you-know-makes-a-good-point\/","title":{"rendered":"When the worst person you know makes a good point"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In case you aren’t terminally online, as the kids say, there’s a popular meme<\/a> that uses a photo of a balding man with a steely gaze and the caption “Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point” (apparently the man’s name is Josep Maria Garc\u00eda, and he is from Spain; the picture was taken in 2014 during a trip to\u00a0Barcelona, during which he helped<\/a> his photographer brother-in-law set up a photoshoot). I was reminded of this meme again while reading all of the coverage of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, which just started<\/a> court proceedings in federal court in California. Some of you may remember that I wrote about this for The Torment Nexus<\/em>, in November of 2024<\/a>, and in that piece I argued that despite having a ton of terrible opinions about a wide range of things, Musk has a number of points in his OpenAI lawsuit that I think are worth considering. Believe me, I don’t like being in this position, but just because he is a difficult or terrible person doesn’t mean he doesn’t make some good points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To recap, Musk originally sued OpenAI<\/a> two years ago, accusing the company of breaching a contract by putting profits ahead of its original goal of developing artificial intelligence in the public interest. In particular, Musk alleged that the multibillion-dollar deal between OpenAI and Microsoft \u2014 which at the time gave the software company a stake in anything developed by OpenAI up until the achievement of what it called “artificial general intelligence,” or human-like abilities \u2014 contravened the company’s pledge to develop AI safely and to make the technology publicly available. The lawsuit came just a few months after OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman survived a boardroom coup in which a number of board members (all of whom have now left the company) tried to have him removed<\/a>. Here’s how the New York Times<\/em> described the Musk lawsuit:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mr. Musk\u2019s lawsuit said he became involved with OpenAI because it was created as a nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence for the \u201cbenefit of humanity.\u201d A key component of that, the lawsuit said, was to make its technology open source, meaning that it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business unit and restricted access to its technology. The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accused OpenAI and Mr. Altman of being in breach of contract and violating fiduciary duty, as well as unfair business practices. Mr. Musk is asking that OpenAI be required to open up its technology to others and that Mr. Altman and others pay back Mr. Musk the money that Mr. Musk gave to the organization.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

A few months after filing the lawsuit, Musk withdrew it<\/a>, and then later refiled it, having strengthened<\/a> the claims about Altman’s behavior and that of OpenAI president Greg Brockman. In particular, he argued that the company had broken federal laws against racketeering by conspiring to defraud him. The suit claimed that Altman and Brockman knowingly misled Musk when they partnered with him to create OpenAI in 2015. \u201cElon Musk\u2019s case against Sam Altman and OpenAI is a textbook tale of altruism over greed,\u201d the suit said. \u201cAltman, in concert with other defendants, intentionally courted and deceived Musk, preying on Musk\u2019s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by A.I.\u201d It may be difficult to imagine a man like Musk \u2014 someone who ran a bogus government department and slashed billions of dollars<\/a> from USAID and other programs, and who sought<\/a> a trillion-dollar payout from his own company \u2014 being described as altruistic in anything but a sarcastic way, but let’s leave that for now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk is asking for more than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, and also wants the court to remove Altman from OpenAI\u2019s board, and to unravel a shift the company recently made to operate as a for-profit company<\/a> (albeit one that is defined as a “public benefit corporation”). In its original form, the company’s operating arm was controlled by a nonprofit foundation, and the amount of money that the for-profit part could make was capped, which Altman said made it difficult to raise the hundreds of billions of dollars required to build out its AI engine. The nonprofit still controls the for-profit arm, but there is no longer a cap, and staff now have equity in the for-profit entity. It is therefore free to pursue a public stock-market listing or IPO, which some believe could value the company as high as $1.2 trillion (although the company recently missed its revenue targets<\/a>, which has some analysts skeptical of its chances on the open market).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: In case you are a first-time reader, or you forgot that you signed up for this newsletter, this is The Torment Nexus. Thanks for reading! You can find out more about me and this newsletter in\u00a0<\/em><\/em>this post.<\/em><\/a> This newsletter survives solely on your contributions, so please sign up for a paying subscription or visit my Patreon, which you can <\/em><\/em>find here<\/em><\/a>. I also publish a daily email newsletter of odd or interesting links called When The Going Gets Weird, <\/em><\/em>which is here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all mankind<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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As the New York Times<\/em> noted in an overview of OpenAI’s creation<\/a>, the concept of an open-source AI company pursuing research for the good of humanity emerged after Musk had a discussion with Google founder Larry Page about where artificial intelligence was going, and the potential risks. The talk reportedly took place during a party for Musk’s 44th birthday, and Page argued that even if AI eventually exterminated humanity, it was still worth pursuing. Musk disagreed, and not long afterward<\/a> he and Altman started talking about creating a nonprofit AI research organization that could try to develop AI safely, and share the results of its research with everyone. OpenAI was launched, and the bulk of the initial funding came from Musk. But by 2017, there was a debate inside the company about whether an open-source nonprofit was the best way to go \u2014 that it might actually be more dangerous, and that it would be unable to raise money. The preamble to Musk’s lawsuit describes what he argues<\/a> happened afterwards:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon \u2014 and in just eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators, and lying to the public. No amount of clever drafting nor surfeit of creative dealmaking can obscure what is happening here. OpenAI, Inc., co-founded by Musk as an independent charity committed to safety and transparency… is, at the direction of Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft, fast becoming a fully for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Musk’s lawsuit, and his repeated claims that “Scam Altman” and Brockman “stole a charity”<\/a> etc., make it sound like he is a selfless altruist, and the current operators of OpenAI are craven capitalists and thieves, but of course we know that the reality is more complex than that. As Altman noted in a statement of defense<\/a>, Musk himself was an advocate of a for-profit structure in the interests of being able to finance the company’s growth, and in fact (according to Altman) he wanted to take control of the company by merging it with Tesla, taking majority ownership, and making himself CEO. Doesn’t that sound altruistic? But as I put it when I wrote about the suit back in 2024<\/a>, even if Musk’s criticisms are driven by naked self-interest, he still makes a fair point: What happened to those early commitments to make OpenAI actually open? To share knowledge about the foundations of its model, so that others could learn and so that outsiders could keep track of any concerning developments as it approached AGI? Didn’t it raise funding based on that vision, and therefore isn’t its current form a betrayal of that goal?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was fairly easy to believe that Musk’s lawsuit was driven by naked self-interest when he was suing for hundreds of millions and the assumption was that it would all go into his pocket, but he recently amended the complaint to state that any proceeds in the way of fines or settlements should be paid to the nonprofit entity inside OpenAI’s new structure. This also helps to derail any lingering suspicions that Musk just wants to cripple OpenAI so that his AI efforts might be spared the competition, something OpenAi and Altman have argued in their past responses <\/a>to the lawsuit (xAI has lost virtually all of its staff and Musk has said he wants to start again on a different path; what was left of xAI has been absorbed<\/a> into SpaceX). Of course, when you are already almost a trillionaire, adding a few more piles of bills to your Scrooge McDuck-style swimming pool of money probably isn’t much of an incentive to do anything, let alone a lawsuit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elon Musk\u00a0testified Tuesday<\/a> he\u2019s suing\u00a0OpenAI because the startup\u2019s pivot from a charity to a for-profit business is wrong and sets a concerning precedent for other philanthropic efforts. \u201cIt is not okay to steal a charity, that\u2019s my view,\u201d Musk told jurors at the outset of a trial in federal court in Oakland, California. Musk said the consequences of the legal fight go far beyond the people involved, and that if Altman and Brockman\u2019s conduct isn\u2019t deemed improper, \u201cthis case will become case law and become precedent to looting every charity in America.\u201d Musk\u2019s lawyer,\u00a0Steven Molo, told the jury the trial will show<\/a> that Altman and Brockman took advantage of Musk\u2019s money, reputation and guidance to get OpenAI off the ground \u2014 and then decided to abandon its public-focused principles and capitalize on the project for their own benefit. Microsoft stood by as they made an \u201cabsolute mockery of OpenAI\u2019s charitable mission,\u201d Molo told the nine-person jury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sociopaths are us<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Musk and his acolytes on X haven’t just been lobbing smears at Altman in the runup to the trial, they’ve also been sharing and promoting a recent piece on Altman<\/a> in The New Yorker<\/em>, which says that “new interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.” But for anyone who has been following Altman’s career both at Y Combinator and after starting OpenAI, there is very little that is new \u2014 or even that shocking \u2014 in the piece. It goes into detail about the maneuvering behind the scenes in the attempt to oust Altman, and how OpenAI staffers like Ilya Sutskever (who left to start his own AI safety firm) and Dario Amodei (who left to start Anthropic with his sister Daniela) didn’t trust Altman because he allegedly “exhibited a consistent pattern of… lying.” Others, including hacker and freedom of information activist Aaron Swartz, are quoted describing Altman as<\/a> a sociopath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We have interviewed more than a hundred people with firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducts business: current and former OpenAI employees and board members; colleagues and competitors; his friends and enemies and several people who, given the mercenary culture of Silicon Valley, have been both. Some people defended Altman\u2019s business acumen and dismissed his rivals as failed aspirants to his throne. Yet most of the people we spoke to shared the judgment of Sutskever and Amodei: Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart. \u201cHe\u2019s unconstrained by truth,\u201d the board member told us. \u201cHe has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I don’t want to belittle the accusations of lying and deception, but are there any billionaires in a position of power in Silicon Valley who aren’t<\/em> sociopaths? Peter Thiel? Marc Andreessen? Mark Zuckerberg? I could go on. And Elon himself is definitely on this list, of course. I mean, everything we know about the man contributes to that impression, including the fact that he has at least fourteen children<\/a> \u2014 that we know of \u2014 with at least four women, and had two partners (the musician known as Grimes and Shivon Zillis, an exec at his brain implant company) in the same hospital having his children at the same time<\/a> without telling either one of them. So we’ll have to call that one a draw between Musk and Altman. I’m not saying this to excuse any of their behavior, just that we can’t really pick sides based on who is more of a sociopath than the other. Is it possible that Musk just wants to F with Altman by filing this lawsuit? Of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, however, I think it’s worth noting that Musk isn’t the only one accusing Altman of diverging from the initial vision of OpenAI: last year, a group of ex-OpenAI staffers filed an amicus brief<\/a>\u00a0in support of Musk and in opposition to the company\u2019s conversion to a for-profit corporation. The brief was filed by Harvard law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, and names 12 former OpenAI employees. If profit was the controlling motive for the company, they said, it would \u201cfundamentally violate its mission.\u201d Several of the ex-staffers have spoken out against OpenAI\u2019s practices publicly before, warning that OpenAI is in a\u00a0\u201creckless\u201d race<\/a> for AI dominance and that\u00a0OpenAI “should not be trusted <\/a>when it promises to do the right thing later.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the brief, OpenAI\u2019s original structure \u2014 a nonprofit controlling a group of other subsidiaries \u2014 was a \u201ccrucial part\u201d of its overall strategy and \u201ccritical\u201d to the organization\u2019s mission. Restructuring that would \u201cbreach the trust of employees, donors, and other stakeholders who joined and supported the organization based on these commitments,\u201d the brief said<\/a>. OpenAI committed to several key principles in setting up its initial mission, according to the signers of the brief. \u201cThese commitments were taken extremely seriously within the company and were repeatedly communicated and treated internally as being binding,” it reads. “The court should recognize that maintaining the nonprofit\u2019s governance is essential to preserving OpenAI\u2019s unique structure, which was designed to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity rather than serving narrow financial interests.\u201d Couldn’t have said it better myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Got any thoughts or comments? Feel free to either leave them here, or post them on <\/em><\/em>Substack<\/em><\/a> or on my <\/em><\/em>website<\/em><\/a>, or you can also reach me on <\/em><\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>, <\/em><\/em>Threads<\/em><\/a>, <\/em><\/em>BlueSky<\/em><\/a> or <\/em><\/em>Mastodon<\/em><\/a>. And thanks for being a reader.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

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Despite having a ton of terrible opinions about a wide range of things, Musk has a number of points in his OpenAI lawsuit that are worth considering. Believe me, I don’t like being in this position<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":285924,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsletters"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Chow_ElonMusk_1800-735x490-1.jpg?fit=735%2C490&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285921"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285928,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285921\/revisions\/285928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}