Elon Musk and Sam Altman Are on the Same Side

Don’t let the l​egal ​d​isputes and social media skirmishes deceive you: The AI titans ​a​re all working toward the same thing.

Every now and again, a billionaire doesn’t get what he wants. On Monday, Elon Musk was handed a rare loss when a federal jury in San Francisco unanimously threw out his lawsuit against OpenAI’s top leaders, including CEO Sam Altman. Musk had alleged that Altman illegally enriched himself when converting OpenAI—the nonprofit both men helped co-found—into a for-profit company. The jury, however, found that Musk, who owns a competing AI company, xAI, waited too long to bring the case. That means Musk won’t get what he sought, at least this time. He won’t get the restoration of OpenAI’s nonprofit status; he won’t get Altman’s removal from its board; and he won’t get more than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft.

Thus ends this little drama. The bigger story isn’t over. Altman may have won against Musk, but their mudfight is a grating and relatively minor plot point in the long chronicle of AI companies’ exploiting lavishly funded public-private partnerships in order to force their plans and products onto the rest of us. Indeed, the many ways that the Trump White House is helping this incestuous network of companies steamroll public opposition and regulation should be understood as part of the administration’s broader pursuit of two mutually dependent goals: minority rule and the enrichment of the ultrawealthy.

Donald Trump and Silicon Valley executives both like to pretend they’re transforming the status quo. A reactionary alliance between the right and big business, though, is pretty standard fare. As historians like Nancy MacLean have detailed, corporate leaders have spent decades attempting to insulate themselves from the democratic decision-making that threatens to limit their profits and their fringe ideologies. Trump’s outlandish behavior shouldn’t distract from........

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