Musk v Altman: How Can Billionaires Claim Money Doesn't Motivate Them?
The federal trial in Oakland is exposing the gap between what tech founders believe about themselves and what a jury can see in front of them.
The essence of being a good trial attorney is the willingness — and I wish journalists had more of this — to awkwardly, almost psychopathically repeat a line of inquiry. And on Monday, Elon Musk’s attorney Steven Molo asked some version of the same question more than a dozen times in two hours. He varied the phrasing. He raised his voice once. He badgered, circled back, and let it hang.
The question was this: how can a man with a nearly $30 billion stake in a company claim that the benefit of humanity, and not money, is driving him?
OpenAI President Greg Brockman’s answer, each time, was some version of the same thing: the money was never the point. The mission drove every decision. The for-profit structure was in service of the nonprofit’s goals. But in federal court in Oakland, Molo tried to to jam him with a sentence Brockman wrote in his journal back in 2017:
“Financially, what will take me to $1B?”
Brockman wrote that while OpenAI was still accepting charitable donations from Elon Musk. He wrote it while publicly committed to the nonprofit mission. But today he insists that the financial opportunity and the world-changing possibilities coexisted in his thinking without contradiction, and that through it all, in spite of idly jotting down his thoughts about the path to a billion dollars, money was not his primary motivation. Most people who’ve never written a sentence like Brockman did might find becoming a billionaire and serving humanity irreconcilable. And Molo tried to put that tension in the starkest possible terms for a jury:
“It takes $30 billion to get you out of bed in the morning, but $1 billion doesn’t?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Brockman replied.
The question of what he is saying — what anyone in the 0.01% is saying when they insist the money is incidental — is worth exploring. Because I don’t believe it’s a lie. It is instead the worldview of people who have been so thoroughly reshaped by wealth that they’ve lost the ability to see it the way you and I do.
To understand how someone worth $30 billion can mean it when they say money isn’t their primary motivation, you need to understand how equity works in practice — not just as a financial instrument, but as a psychological one.
