Elon Musk helped birth OpenAI in 2015, a world-changing AI non-profit which he lavished with tens of millions of dollars alongside its now-CEO Sam Altman. Now in 2026, he’s suing to unwind the entire project with a civil suit, claiming that Altman betrayed the nonprofit’s mission by turning it into a profit-seeking machine — never mind the fact that Musk also runs his own for-profit AI company, xAI.

The civil trial, taking place in San Francisco, pits two of tech’s most powerful egos against each other in a duel for control over the broader AI ecosystem. That being the case, it’s already devolved into a circus just days into the case, with the erratic Musk emerging as a key liability in his own proceedings.

During day three of the trial, Elon Musk struggled to present a confident front, which led to a number of unforced errors. One of his major blunders came when the billionaire claimed that “Tesla is not pursuing AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, the north star for American AI developers broadly defined as the point at which AI reaches human-level intelligence.

That might seem like a no-brainer — Tesla is an electric vehicle company, after all — but it stands in direct contradiction to Musk’s own comments not even two months earlier.

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Futurism