If Miles Bron, purveyor of glass onions and self-obsessed billionaire, had been entrusted with rockets rather than riddles, the results might have looked familiar to those watching as two Olympian confabulators went to war in a sterile federal courthouse room in Oakland, California last week.
Up first, Elon Musk, who took the stand with the same untroubled conviction he wears everywhere like his manky, signature scent: certain of his brilliance, politely baffled by dissent, and sustained by the touching belief that a statement, delivered with sufficient confidence, may pass for a fact.
Musk has always been a man who enters rooms, Zaphod-like, as though all such spaces were built to amplify his incontestable genius. Boardrooms, launchpads, social media platforms – each has, in its turn, been rearranged to suit his narrative. But courtrooms are not narrative spaces. They are accounting exercises with harsher lighting. They are less concerned with what you say you meant than what you signed.
And so there he was, under oath, attempting to persuade a judge that OpenAI, which he helped create, had strayed from its charitable origins. Elon, as Knight Templar, at the gates of Constantinople.
It is, on its face, a sympathetic argument. The transformation of idealistic ventures into profit-seeking machines is a story as old as ambition and twice as reliable. Musk’s version casts him as the betrayed patron saint of artificial intelligence, funding a moral enterprise only to watch it grow a balance sheet.
The difficulty is not the story. The difficulty is Musk.
Under questioning, the narrative began to fray in the small, humiliating ways that only legal proceedings can produce. Asked about a crucial 2017 document detailing OpenAI’s shift toward a “capped-profit” model, Musk admitted he had not read the fine print. He had read, he said, the “headline.”
The rest, those few modest pages where consequences usually hide, he had not. Only the little people read the details, apparently. Musk, a man who has built companies that depend on microscopic precision, had apparently decided this was where efficiency should triumph over diligence.
One could almost admire the purity of it.
That exchange set the tone for his testimony. Musk, accustomed to dominating conversations, found himself pinned to them. When he suggested that opposing counsel’s questions were designed to trick him, the court responded with a reminder that would have felt at home in a well-run classroom: answer the question.
He tried, which is to say, he ducked, he weaved, and he circled. Occasionally, he elaborated. He did everything, in short, except answer in the clean, surgical manner courts tend to prefer. Judges, unlike shareholders, are unimpressed by flourish. They favour something closer to obedience.
No hobgoblins allowed
This being Elon, there were also contradictions, those small, gleaming betrayals that require no embellishment. But as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously cautioned, consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind, and Elon’s brain is very, very big, as big as he is handsome, as big as he is charming and vast in the way his social media posts are hilarious.
Musk warned of the existential dangers of artificial intelligence, a position he has held with evangelical enthusiasm. Yet he now runs an AI company of his own because he is a superintelligence, and it takes one to know one. He conceded, under pressure, that for-profit entities can produce social good. This is undeniably true. It is also not particularly helpful when one’s central claim is that OpenAI’s drift toward profit constitutes a kind of ethical betrayal. The argument began to resemble a man insisting that money corrupts, except when it behaves.
Meanwhile, hovering just offstage was the version of events offered by OpenAI itself – a version less charitable to Musk’s Dorian self-portrait. According to the company’s account, Musk was not merely a disappointed idealist. He was, at one point, an enthusiastic architect of the very structure he now condemns.
He proposed a for-profit model. He sought majority control. He wanted to be CEO. It was, by any reasonable measure, a robust vision of leadership, and one that placed him firmly at the centre of things, where he belongs.
And then there is the detail first revealed by OpenAI in an information dump almost two years ago that refuses to be ignored, because it is simply too perfect: This was about something grander – Musk’s need for approximately $US80 billion, to fund his Martian Xanadu.
As an allegory for how far the Valley has drifted from the world of real things, recently, eighty billion dollars for a city on another planet, offered as a practical consideration in a discussion about corporate structure, checks in. We have all stopped being surprised by the ways wealth rearranges reality.
The figure does not so much undermine Musk’s argument as illuminate it. This is not a man thinking in increments. This is a man for whom scale has become a kind of intoxication. Nonprofit versus for-profit is, at that altitude, less a moral distinction than a logistical one.
Sam Altman, Musk’s Ennemi juré, and Bond villain to Elon’s Bond villain, has not yet had his time on the stand. Sam’s lawyers are no doubt advising him that the most effective strategy is to let the other man talk until he has explained himself into a corner.
And Elon, unfortunately for Elon, is a generous explainer.
None of this makes him foolish. Musk is, by any objective measure, extraordinarily capable. He has reshaped industries, altered expectations, and convinced the world that impossible things are merely delayed – things like the Nazi-adjacent AfD is winning control of Germany in some future election, sliming into power on the poisonous tailings of Elon’s rivers of gold. Look how well that worked out for Viktor Orban.
But capability is not immunity, and in a courtroom, intelligence is only as useful as its discipline.
What the proceedings reveal is Musk’s real weakness – a surplus of narrative. The man has spent years constructing a version of himself that operates at mythic scale: the builder of futures, the solver of existential problems, the man who sees further because he refuses to look down.
The trouble is that courtrooms insist on looking down. They examine the ground beneath the myth, the emails, the agreements, and the moments when intention became action. They ask not what you meant to build, but what you agreed to build.
And in that narrower, harsher frame, Musk appears less like a betrayed visionary and more like a participant in a disagreement about control.
Honestly, it’s the most human thing about him.
It is difficult not to wallow in schadenfreude, watching a man accustomed to omnipotence encounter limitation, brought low not by the grand limitations of physics or engineering but by the small, procedural limitations of law. He may not elaborate or redefine the question. And he may not, no matter how compelling his narrative, escape the record.
For Musk, that record is proving an uncooperative companion. It remembers things he would prefer to phrase differently, and it contains ambitions that sit awkwardly beside his claims. It is, in short, doing exactly what it was designed to do – telling the story without him.
In the courtroom, even Mars must wait its turn.
Elon Musk has finally discovered the one frontier he cannot quite colonise – the past. It’s Sam’s turn next.
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