Musk calls himself a 'fool' in court as OpenAI's lawyers go through his correspondence

On the third day of the Musk v. OpenAI trial, the dispute over the company's nonprofit mission turned into a hard-edged examination of Musk's own words and actions. OpenAI's lead attorney tried to show the court that the lawsuit is driven not by defense of principles but by accumulated competitive resentment.

A day of hard questions

The key episode of the day was the cross-examination of Elon Musk by OpenAI's lead lawyer, William Savitt. Rather than argue in the abstract about how the company should be structured, the defense focused on concrete documents: emails, financial commitments and correspondence.

The defense's line was simple: if Musk really stood for preserving OpenAI's original charitable logic, his own actions should bear that out. Savitt essentially tried to take that version apart piece by piece, relying not on outside assessments but on material tied to the billionaire himself.

Musk did not soften his rhetoric in response. On the witness stand, he called himself a "fool" for having funded OpenAI at the time, and accused the company's leadership of having "looted a nonprofit organization."

But the emotional wording did not settle the central question: why did the grievances arise now, and how closely are they tied to the way the AI market has changed? Judging by accounts of the hearing, OpenAI's defense built its pressure on exactly this point. It did not argue with Musk's dissatisfaction; it showed that his motives may be less idealistic than he claims.

What the defense was built on

One of the central goals of OpenAI's lawyers was to shift the focus from the question of mission to the question of consistency. To do so, they raised several sensitive topics at once: the shortfall in promised funding, old email discussions and messages from Shivon Zilis. Framed this way, the lawsuit looks not like an attempt to save a nonprofit model but like a dispute between a former co-founder and an organization that took a path he dislikes, both personally and strategically.

For OpenAI this is an important move: if the court sees the suit primarily as a commercial conflict, the plaintiff's moral position will weaken noticeably.

• Musk's own emails were used as an argument against his current version of events
• Unfulfilled financial pledges showed a gap between statements and actions
• Shivon Zilis's messages helped reconstruct the internal context of the conflict
• The defense tried to present the suit as a competitive claim disguised as a dispute over principles

The strongest detail of the day is that OpenAI's lawyers, apparently, did not try to build their defense on formal legal arguments alone. They hit Musk's narrative with his own documents. That approach often works better than loud statements, because it turns the trial from an ideological debate into a test for internal contradictions.

Against this backdrop, Musk's admission that he feels deceived and even looks like a "fool" because of his early involvement may have sounded striking to the public, but it may also have played into the hands of opponents who wanted to show the conflict as personal rather than public in nature.

"I was a fool," Musk said of his funding of OpenAI.

What this means

The trial looks less and less like a debate over the pure philosophy of AI development and more and more like a test of motives, documents and old agreements among OpenAI's early figures. If the defense manages to cement the idea that Musk's suit is above all a reaction to lost influence and a shifted balance of power in the market, the company's position will become noticeably stronger.

For the whole industry it is also a reminder: in the era of big AI companies, early ideals and current commercial interests almost always collide in court, not just in public posts.