The details coming out of the San Francisco courtroom are more interesting than most of this year's tech news. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in his testimony told a scene no Silicon Valley screenwriter would invent - Elon Musk in 2017 was considering handing OpenAI over to his children, in case he died while controlling the company.

The testimony is part of Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, in which he accuses the founders of having „stolen a charity" by transforming it into a commercial structure. Altman responded that he found the framing itself hard to grasp - and reminded the court that OpenAI still has a substantive charitable foundation that continues to operate.

The key moment in his testimony was precisely that 2017 episode. Musk had been discussing succession of power inside the company, and Altman read that as a red flag. „A concentration of power of that scale", as he later put it, was in his view in direct contradiction with OpenAI's core mission.

Altman didn't hold back from professional criticism either. According to him, Musk didn't understand how to run a research lab: „I don't think Mr Musk understood how to run a good research laboratory". The management style Musk used at Tesla and SpaceX - with brutal engineer rankings and periodic „purges" of the weakest - according to Altman destroyed the working atmosphere when transplanted into a research environment.

Even so, the relationship wasn't completely cut off. Musk was kept informed about Microsoft's 2018 investment - the moment when OpenAI was already heading down the commercial path with or without him. Altman even described a scene in which Musk, at one such meeting, showed him memes on his phone.

For readers still looking for „who's the good guy and who's the bad guy" in this story - the answer doesn't exist. The two founders of OpenAI are clashing over something they once dreamed of together. Musk says OpenAI gave up on its principles. Altman says Musk only ever wanted absolute control. Whichever is true, what is fact now is that OpenAI has closed its series of transformations and emerged as the largest player in artificial intelligence. And that's why the trial is still being heard.