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reuters.com2026-05-01

Key takeaways from Musk's testimony at OpenAI trial - Reuters

PolicyIndustry

Elon Musk took the stand in the OpenAI trial and, in a masterclass of unintended irony, revealed that he personally recruited Ilya Sutskever from Google and leaned on his mates at Microsoft and Nvidia for computing power. So the lawsuit claiming OpenAI abandoned its mission rests on a man who was, by his own account, the very conduit through which Big Tech got its hooks in. Splendid.

Musk testified he called Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang to secure compute for the startup—networking that would make any LinkedIn influencer weep with envy. Now he's suing because OpenAI made deals with Microsoft? The cognitive dissonance is so thick you could serve it with chips. Meanwhile, the court gets to hear how the 'benevolent' nonprofit was powered by billionaires and server farms from day one.

The real takeaway? Two years of litigation, and we're learning that OpenAI's founding myth—plucky altruists versus the Google empire—was always a convenient fiction. Musk wants to play both architect and victim. But the rest of us are stuck watching a mess he helped build, now served up as courtroom kabuki.

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● REC · 2026