Musk’s attorney apologizes for his absence at trial during closing arguments – NBC News
Molo told the jury that five witnesses under oath in the trial had called Altman a liar. He compared Altman’s track record to a rickety bridge.
“If a bridge was built on Sam Altman’s reputation for telling the truth, I don’t think you’d cross that bridge,” he said.
He also attacked Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman for getting rich off the organization, noting in particular Brockman’s nearly $30 billion stake and Altman’s investments in companies that have made deals with OpenAI.
Molo told the jurors to ignore the fact that OpenAI’s foundation arm has an even bigger stake in the for-profit side of the organization. The foundation’s stake was valued at $130 billion last year.
“If you go and rob a bank and you take $1 million from the bank, it’s not a defense to say, ‘I left $100 million in the bank,’” Molo said.
Later in the day, Savitt said that Molo’s bank robbery analogy was flawed because Altman, Brockman and other OpenAI employees created the value in question in the first place.
“Has anyone heard of a bank robbery where the bank robbers invented the bank, created $200 billion of value and put all the money into the bank?” Savitt said.
Sarah Eddy, a second lawyer for OpenAI and its executives, said that Musk was lying to the jury about his true intentions. She said there was no evidence that Musk, when he gave money to OpenAI in its early days, wanted it to remain a nonprofit, and she said Musk pushed on his own to create a for-profit arm in 2017.
“Mr. Musk is the one whose testimony is contradicted by every witness and all the documents,” she told the jury in her closing statement.
“Mr. Musk wanted to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company that he could control,” she added, noting that Musk once proposed merging OpenAI into Tesla.
Eddy also said that Musk waited too long to sue. Any complaints he’s making now, she said, he could have made as far back as 2017, when OpenAI’s co-founders discussed a pivot to being a for-profit company in order to raise money.
“In this case, the statute of limitations is not a technical defense. It’s a textbook case for why we have a statute-of-limitations defense in the first place,” she said. “He could not bring a claim even if he had one, which he doesn’t.”
