The case of Musk vs. OpenAI’s alleged breach of contract is actually a revelation that the Silicon Valley elite is a strong network of collaborators, even within rival companies. The Pentagon’s recent deal with seven of those companies shows how these elites can get into the state machine and change it.
In this case, the plaintiffs are Elon Musk and Shivon Zilis, who is the mother of Musk’s four children. However, he is not a plaintiff because of that, but because he was a board member of OpenAI at the time. The defendants are Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, CEO and President of OpenAI and co-founders of Musk. Altman is gay and married to her husband; Brockman married his wife on a work day at the OpenAI office in a ceremony hosted by Ilya Sutskever, also a co-founder and chief scientist.
You may think that those personal details are irrelevant, but I would argue that they are not, because at the core of this study is a conflict between two members of one special group. This is a group that studies (and leaves) at the same educational institutions – Harvard, Yale, MIT-shares the same networks, and owns and works in the same companies, which, although some are competitors, are also deeply connected. They also have the same worldview, although they may take different positions in politics.
Musk accuses Altman and Brockman of violating the company’s original non-profit agreement and turning most of it into a for-profit business. In March 2026, OpenAI made a record-breaking funding round, raising $122 billion and achieving a post-money valuation of $852 billion.
Elon has a point. He first invested, according to him, about $100 million in a non-profit intellectual property with the goal of “creating the first general AI and using it to empower the individual—that is, a distributed version of the future that appears to be very secure. In general, security should be a first-level requirement,” according to the first email exchange between Musk and Altman. Altman wrote: “This technology can be fundamental and will be used ‘for the good of the world’.
The first idea, according to the documents revealed as part of this case, was to create an AI lab that could develop technology that could eventually lead to AGI with the goal that if that happens, it will not be a proprietary technology owned by any person or company – especially Google, whose DeepMind project is prominently featured in this first exchange as a contender to beat.
That may seem like a pretty good effort. That is, assuming that AGI was possible with current LLMs, which is very unlikely or impossible, and we assume that their intentions were true, which is impossible. As the project began to take shape, human motives began to emerge. Brockman wanted to be a millionaire. Musk wanted more stake that would allow him to control. Altman—well, his motives are unclear in the text; however, from the very beginning, he seemed convinced that it would be impossible to achieve the company’s goal without going private.
As I understand it, Musk feels betrayed by one of the greatest salesmen alive—perhaps second only to Netanyahu—and brilliant. It is also important that Musk’s next AI project at X was acquired by his company SpaceX and is preparing for a major IPO. Altman is also preparing for an IPO for OpenAI. He argues that Musk’s lawsuit is aimed at undermining and holding back much of the investment. He, perhaps, has a point. Nat has written an excellent summary of the background of this study and what is at stake.
However, what I have found to go through the evidence presented in this case reveals something completely different. Something most of us know about but rarely have access to: the personal connections and relationships between top CEOs, founders, and investors in the technology sector. They know each other, they talk to each other, they ask each other for mercy.
For example, Musk personally asked the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, to ensure that OpenAI will receive one of the first supercomputers in the company. He also spoke with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft—who is a witness in this case because of Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI—to ensure 10,000 servers with the latest Nvidia GPUs. There are also discussions between Musk and Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, about bidding together on OpenAI IP.
Altman was president of venture capital firm Y Combinator, where Peter Thiel was an investor. The shows also show his connection with Bill Gates or Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and other technology executives.
The content and nature of those communications are both personal and professional. They are done through email, text message, phone calls, and in-person meetings that take place in offices but also in homes. The emerging pattern is that of a connected group of people who control the technology that supports much of modern life in the developed world—this time especially in the West—and move to gain control of the financial rails and defense systems.
The Pentagon has reached agreements with seven of these Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection (which does not yet have a public model), Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services. “These agreements accelerate the transition to establishing the United States military as an AI-first force and will strengthen our military’s ability to maintain superior decision-making across all battlefields,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
The US Department of Defense—or War—has already requested $54 billion for private weapons development that will go to some of these companies, or others, such as Palantir or Anduril, and has said it will request more funding for programs related to intelligence, classified and non-classified information networks (ie, surveillance), and more.
In case you think that Anthropic is different because they rejected the conditions of the Pentagon to be able to use their technology in mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, Anthropic and SpaceX recently signed an agreement for the former to use the capacity of the latter’s data center, which begins to set up an alliance.
Pentagon contracts will put technology companies in the military-industrial complex. As warfare moves from expensive mechanized weapons systems to smaller and cheaper AI-enabled ones, and as those mechanized weapons introduce AI software, technology companies will eventually opt for military-industrial collaboration.
Financial systems based on mainstream banking, which present a ledger between issuers (governments) and the population, will also eventually be integrated with digital AI-enabled technology, as CBDCs or stablecoins become a common unit of account—and control. A similar process takes place within government systems, exemplified by the DOGE, which can be understood as an evaluation system. Finally, all the important mechanisms of the current social system will be brought to book based on digital technology powered by AI.
This book will be under the control, in the West, of the same people who are fighting in the courts today. This, too, could end up with a digital AI notebook. Consider their new project: objection.ai, which calls itself a “court of truth” and boasts investment from Peter Thiel and other “top VCs” on the homepage.
The new platform is said to “give everyone a quick, affordable, evidence-based way to challenge statements in the media.” The main idea is that if you feel that the publication has defamed you, you can “file an objection” on the platform, which will ask the publisher to upload evidence and will give its investigator to collect all the evidence “regardless of who it helps.” It will then feed this information to an AI model that will “review all the evidence and make an unbiased, evidence-based judgment.”
It’s not hard to see how this could be an example of an AI-based justice system and how that could be bad. The fact that these people are currently fighting in the courts is an indication that they are not there yet. In the meantime, they are “invited” by the traditional power managers—the Pentagon, the financial system, the military complex, etc.—because they promise to generate more money and more power. But if how their technology has penetrated and transformed public life should be an example, then we can expect the same thing to happen within the power grid.
However, as they become part of the power structure, their differences will have to be worked out and resolved. We should expect more from this. If we stop seeing it in public, we should know why.
