Elon Musk helped birth OpenAI in 2015, a world-changing AI non-profit which he lavished with tens of millions of dollars alongside its now-CEO Sam Altman. Now in 2026, he’s suing to unwind the entire project with a civil suit, claiming that Altman betrayed the nonprofit’s mission by turning it into a profit-seeking machine — nevermind the fact that Musk also runs his own for-profit AI company, xAI.
The civil trial, taking place in San Francisco, pits two of tech’s most powerful egos against each other in a duel for control over the broader AI ecosystem. That being the case, it’s already devolved into a circus just days into the case, with the erratic Musk emerging as a key liability in his own proceedings.
During day three of the trial, Elon Musk struggled to present a confident front, which led to a number of unforced errors. One of his major blunders came when the billionaire claimed that “Tesla is not pursuing AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, the north star for American AI developers broadly defined as the point at which AI reaches human-level intelligence.
That might seem like a no-brainer — Tesla is an electric vehicle company, after all — but it stands in direct contradiction to Musk’s own comments not even two months earlier.
“Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form,” Musk wrote on X-formerly-Twitter as recently as March 4, 2026. That comment was even entered as an exhibit in the court case, officially enshrining Musk’s lies into the judicial record.
The blunders didn’t stop there. At one point, Musk was asked if he was romantically involved with the Canadian venture capitalist Shivon Zilis, with whom the billionaire shares four kids. “I think so,” Musk replied on the witness stand.
Later, Musk admitted that he “did not read the fine print” of an OpenAI term sheet Altman had sent his way back in 2018, as the billionaire stepped away from the company’s board. “It’s a four-page document,” the opposing lawyer retorted.
As Hard Reset reporter Alex Shultz noted, Musk could have easily skimmed the document before he took the stand, but must have decided his time would be better spent elsewhere.
It all paints a rather dithering picture of Musk, who can’t be bothered to do even the bare minimum preparation for his lawsuit where the stakes are, in his attorney’s words, the “good of humanity as a whole.”
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