By David Swan
Publication Date: 2026-05-01 19:00:00
For two men whose companies promise to reshape civilization, opening day was strangely dull. The microphones in a federal courtroom in downtown Oakland kept cutting out. A presentation slide disappeared from the screens. “We can’t hear you,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said, before wryly noting that the federal judiciary would happily accept additional taxpayer money.
Sitting under the neon lights this week were Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. Their tech empires are collectively worth more than $3 trillion ($4.2 trillion). Yet here they were, just meters apart, battling through technical problems, separated by years of broken friendship, as the most momentous trial of the AI age finally began.
Musk vs. Altman is, on…
