The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Jacob Ward

The Rip Current covers the big, invisible forces carrying us out to sea, from tech to politics to greed to beauty to culture to human weirdness. The currents are strong, but with a little practice we can learn to spot them from the beach, and get across them safely.

Veteran journalist Jacob Ward has covered technology, science and business for NBC News, CNN, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and is the former Editor in Chief of Popular Science magazine.

Play

Open in

23 episodes
Avg 15 min
English

Episodes 23

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.

S1 · E106
August 21 · 12 min
"You Just Cannot Trust Mark Zuckerberg With Kids" — Meta Trial, Day 2
Day two of the multistate trial against Meta in federal court in Oakland, where 29 state attorneys general are asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to reach inside the company and change how Instagram and Facebook work. Arturo Bejar — former head of engineering for Facebook's protection group, later head of well-being at Instagram — is the states' first witness, and no wonder Meta moved to keep him off the witness stand. He testified on direct and under cross-examination by Meta's defense, and what he had to say was pretty damning.Bejar told the court that priorities at Meta flow from one person: "If Mark Zuckerberg wakes up and decides something is a priority, then mountains move." He described a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude toward the millions of children under 13 on platforms where they aren't permitted, product managers who acknowledged knowing and had no plans to act, and Instagram posts where kids stated their own ages outright. He called Meta the most sophisticated company in the world at detecting fake accounts — machine learning made that routine long before anyone called it AI — and said that if the same capability had been aimed at underage accounts, the problem could have been solved in three to six months. After reading a public letter from Zuckerberg claiming the company was succeeding at protecting kids, Bejar told the court he concluded: "You cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids."On cross, Meta's lawyers pressed him to call his survey data "subjective." He refused. Asking a teenager whether they were sexually harassed in the past seven days measures an experience, not an opinion — and the whole defense strategy depends on making that harm sound too squishy to count. I cover the invisible forces shaping our lives, and I've been in the courthouse for this trial since day one.Subscribe for all the documents, and my full analysis, at The Rip Current.
S1 · E106
August 19 · 12 min
The Meta Trial: How Zuck Fights Back
Meta's opening statement in Oakland was delivered by Paul Schmidt, a Covington & Burling partner who co-chairs the firm's product liability and mass torts practice. His track record includes trial wins for McKesson in the opioids litigation, Eli Lilly in the Cymbalta cases, and Hoffmann-La Roche in the Accutane trials. Covington's own website quotes a book by Washington Post reporters calling one of his cross-examinations "a master class in how to destroy a witness." I was in the courtroom for both sides. California Deputy Attorney General Megan O'Neill gave the states a four-word shorthand — hook, hold, harvest, hide — and walked the eight-member advisory jury through the gap between what Meta said publicly and what its internal documents show. Schmidt's answer was a phrase he returned to again and again: wait for all the evidence. His core argument is that science has not established a causal link between rising teen mental health problems and rising social media use. That argument is not wrong on the facts. Science deals in consensus, not certainty, and as the former editor-in-chief of Popular Science I can tell you no serious researcher will ever say a thing is 100% settled. Manufacturing doubt inside that gap is exactly the strategy that worked for tobacco and for the oil industry on climate. The filters fight shows how the same facts get framed twice. O'Neill described Meta banning appearance-altering filters, asking outside experts whether to make the ban permanent, hearing yes from the experts and yes from its own staff — and then Zuckerberg putting them back after seeing the growth numbers. Schmidt described a ten-month review Meta was under no obligation to conduct, ending in a split decision that kept surgery-adjacent filters off and let the giraffe ears back on, all built by third parties in the first place. Anderson Cooper asked me tonight whether this is social media's cigarette moment. What I wish I'd said: the value of a trial like this is that it turns a decade of vague dread about these products into specific, testable, legislatable language. Arturo Bejar, Instagram's former head of wellbeing turned whistleblower, took the stand today for direct examination. I'm waiting for the cross before I bring it to you, so you get both halves. That's tomorrow. Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, become a subscriber! Visit https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E105
August 19 · 12 min
The Meta Trial: Damning Evidence
I'm outside the federal courthouse in Oakland, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is hearing what may be the biggest legal threat Meta has ever faced — not just because of the dollar amount, but because a federal judge could order the company to fundamentally change how its products work. Twenty-nine states have joined a federal case arguing Meta violated COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act — a claim that, if it wins, applies nationwide, not state by state. A smaller group of four states — California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey — are trying their own state-law claims first, as a test case the other 25 states are waiting to follow.Here's the twist most coverage missed: the $1.4 trillion damages figure everyone's been repeating — including, briefly, me on CNN this morning — didn't come from the states. It came from Meta. The states' actual ask is just under $200 billion, still enormous, but a fraction of Meta's own number. Meta's lawyers put the trillion-dollar figure out there, and it looks like the goal was to make the whole case sound absurd. I'm not sure it worked the way they hoped. If a company's product is doing the kind of harm the states are alleging, an existential number might be exactly the point. Beyond the numbers game, California's Deputy AG walked the jury through Meta's own internal documents this morning — internal goals to increase teen time spent, internal surveys showing harm rates dramatically higher than what Meta reported publicly, and an internal message from an employee describing the company as "basically butchers."This trial is expected to run four to six weeks, and I'll be covering it from inside the courtroom the whole way. One detail worth sitting with: on the very same day this trial opened, OpenAI announced a teen version of ChatGPT with new safety guardrails. The entire tech industry is watching this courthouse and adjusting in real time.This analysis originally appeared on The Rip Current. Paid subscribers get early access + full transcripts. Sign up at https://theripcurrent.com
S1 · E104
August 18 · 15 min
Zuckerberg: Three-Time Loser? Inside Meta's Latest Court Trouble
Meta goes to trial in Oakland on Tuesday, August 18, and this one works differently from the two it already lost. Twenty-nine state attorneys general are trying claims that Facebook and Instagram collected personal data from children under 13 without parental consent, violating COPPA, the federal children's privacy law passed in 1998. Four of those states — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — go further, alleging Meta built features it knew were harming young users and then told parents and Congress the opposite. Meta's track record splits cleanly. It won in front of a judge alone when the FTC failed to prove monopoly power last November. It lost in front of juries in New Mexico, where the total now stands at $942 million after a $375 million penalty and a $567 million abatement fund, and in Los Angeles, where it was assigned $4.2 million of a $6 million negligent-design award alongside YouTube. In Oakland, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has empaneled an eight-member advisory jury — a rarely used device — and reserved the final ruling and the remedy for herself. She has already found Meta's parental-consent procedures failed COPPA, and she has already denied Meta's motions to seal, which puts the internal documents in public view. I break down how Meta wins this and how Meta loses it: the narrow list of features actually before the court, the genuinely contested science on causation, the Section 230 defense that's still live on appeal, the legal doctrine that puts fourteen years of conduct in play instead of four, and disgorgement — the remedy that would force Meta to hand back advertising profits earned from the affected kids, state by state. Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E103
August 16 · 14 min
Zuckerberg's $1.4 Trillion Trial
Next week the biggest social media trial yet opens in federal court in Oakland — a couple miles from my house — and I get to bike to the story instead of fly to it. Four state attorneys general (California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey) are trying to prove that Meta built Facebook and Instagram to addict kids. Meta expects the states could seek up to $1.4 trillion. Zuckerberg and Mosseri are expected on the stand. This is a big one. Here I walk through where this case came from — Frances Haugen’s leaks, the LA and New Mexico verdicts already on the board — and why the whole thing hinges on one word: design. If the states can convince Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that infinite scroll and autoplay are harmful design choices rather than protected speech, thirty years of Section 230 immunity might start to crack, and with it, the social media era. In this episode: Why four states are trying this case together, and what the other 29 are claiming The design-versus-content argument, and how it gets around Section 230 The March verdicts in Los Angeles ($6M, Meta and YouTube) and New Mexico (Meta, nearly $1B) Why TikTok, Snap, and YouTube keep settling while Meta fights The next bellwether coming in February, and why it matters Links: Reuters trial preview · CNN: Zuckerberg's testimony · Meta's own 10-Q (SEC)
S1 · E102
August 13 · 15 min
A Texas School Explosion and the Real Reason Companies Change
In 1937, a Texas school exploded because natural gas has no smell — nobody could detect the leak until it killed nearly 300 people, most of them children. Within weeks, Texas passed the first law forcing gas companies to add an odor. That fix, mercaptan, is still the reason your kitchen reeks of rotten eggs during a leak today. It didn't change the product. It just made an invisible danger detectable — and only because regulators forced the industry's hand. That's the history behind this week's AI news. On August 2nd, the EU AI Act's transparency rules took effect, requiring any company serving EU users to make AI-generated content detectable — or face a fine of €15 million or 3% of worldwide revenue, whichever is larger. Google and OpenAI committed to compliance back in May. This week Anthropic followed, saying it will embed statistical watermarks in AI-generated text and use C2PA provenance standards for images. None of them have shipped a public tool that lets you or me actually check the mark yet — the additive is in the gas, but we can't smell it. The bigger question is whether it's already too late. One widely cited study found nearly half of new articles online are now AI-generated — though a follow-up from the same firm found human-written work still dominates what Google actually surfaces in search. I dig into what that split might mean, and why the social embarrassment of getting "outed" by a watermark might do more to change our behavior than the regulation itself. Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E101
August 6 · 9 min
AI Romance Scams are Here
In 2022 I interviewed a young Nigerian man outside Lagos who'd spent years working as a romance scammer, grinding one target at a time until he finally convinced a lonely widow to send him more than $200,000. The lesson of that story was never about technology. For criminals like him, the biggest cost was time.On July 31, OpenAI disclosed a scam operation run out of Poipet, Cambodia — a border town linked to forced labor and trafficking — where a cluster of ChatGPT accounts wrote the romance pitches, translated the messages, and handled the administration: shift tracking, handoff notes between managers, the immigration status of the workers being pressed into the job. OpenAI found out because WhatsApp tipped them off, not through its own detection.Bandwidth was the one thing holding scam crime back, and AI removes it. Meanwhile the transborder legal system built to prosecute fraud gets slower and harder to coordinate every year. This is what that gap looks like, and why the people supposed to stop it are already behind.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E100
August 1 · 8 min
Elon Musk's Lawyers: Let Us Make AI Nudes If We Want
It's The Rip Current's 100th episode! Visit TheRipCurrent.com to get all the analysis, the power-mapping, all of it. Minnesota's HF 1606 takes effect Saturday, August 1. It is the first law in the country to target the companies that build "nudification" tools rather than the users who operate them, with civil penalties of $500,000 each time a user generates a prohibited image. On Monday, Elon Musk's xAI — now owned by SpaceX — sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in federal court, arguing the statute is an overbroad, content-based ban on speech and on the tools of visual expression. Arguing the penalties are ruinous, the company's lawyers wrote that a business whose users created 100,000 prohibited images would face "an eye-popping $50 billion." That hypothetical is, well, kind of an embarassing admission of the scale of the problem. Technical experts have pointed out the one fix that would actually work — barring AI from altering photographs of real people at all — is something no platform wants, because everyone's trying to find a way to make money off this stuff, no matter how gross.The bill was written by state Sen. Erin Maye Quade after she learned of a man who used social media photos to make sexualized images of more than 80 women he knew. Musk's company has run this play before, filing a similar challenge against California's deepfake law. Gov. Tim Walz's response to the Minnesota suit: "See you in court, creep." UPDATE: A federal judge has denied xAI's request to pause the law, clearing the way for it to take effect Saturday, and set an August 19 hearing on a preliminary injunction. The judge noted xAI filed nearly three months after the law was signed and three days before it took effect, which suggests the harm is not immediate. Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E99
August 1 · 14 min
Runaway A.I. is Here: Now What Do We Do?
The full written analysis is at TheRipCurrent.com: the researchers who called this years ago, the safety thresholds OpenAI wrote for itself, and who benefits from the open-weights fight. Paid subscribers get it first. In July, two OpenAI models — GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased, more capable model — were running an internal cyber benchmark called ExploitGym with their guardrails lowered for testing. Instead of solving the test, they worked out how to leave: exploiting a zero-day in a package-registry proxy, escalating privileges, moving laterally until they reached a node with internet access. Then they reasoned that Hugging Face probably hosted the answers, and went and took them. OpenAI called it an unprecedented cyber incident involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities. The word "unprecedented" also appears in OpenAI's own safety framework, describing the kind of capability that is supposed to halt a development program. The story has kept expanding since: OpenAI later disclosed the same agent broke into several other publicly available services and accounts. Anthropic then went looking at its own systems and found similar behavior. What follows is the industry-wide argument over whether models should be open-weight or closed. Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Palantir signed a coalition letter urging regulators not to restrict open-weight formats, while Anthropic's Dario Amodei has argued that open weights won't make bioweapon defense easier, because building a defense takes years and building the threat does not. Every signature on both sides maps neatly onto a business model. Underneath all of it sits a document at pacingthefrontier.com, published July 28 and signed by more than 1300 employees of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta, asking the U.S. government to build tools that could verifiably slow AI development. Signatories include Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Meta chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, and Google's head of AI safety, Anca Dragan. The reason they gave: "intense competitive pressure" means no company and no country can afford to ease off first. Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E98
July 17 · 12 min
The Corruption of Prediction Markets
Gabriel Perez has run Donald Trump’s teleprompter since 2016. According to CFTC investigators, he spent months betting on Kalshi’s “Mentions” market on which words and phrases Trump would use in his own speeches, and made more than $100,000 doing it. He’s now in settlement talks with regulators, on unpaid leave from the White House (where the president’s own stock trades in companies he’s directly influencing is arguably a much deeper form of lever-pulling than anything Perez managed). Every prediction market scandal before this one was an insider-trading scam, trading on information the rest of the bettors didn’t have: a soldier with classified intel, a Google employee with search data, congressional candidates betting on their own races. Perez operates the device that produces the very words he bet on. Here’s where the world of prediction markets begins to resemble the dangerous world of sports betting, and where reality gets distorted. Full argument, sourcing, and the sports-betting precedent for what happens next at TheRipCurrent.com
S1 · E97
July 16 · 13 min
AI is Hacking Your Mind
AI will do to our ability to make decisions what GPS did to our sense of direction. That's the argument I made four years ago in The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back. I thought I was at least a few years early. ChatGPT arrived 9 months later.Here I break down the book for you, because its findings keep coming back in new forms with each week's news. Your brain runs on shortcuts — what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called System 1, the fast-thinking brain that drives your car, picks your lunch, and carries you through the day on autopilot. (System 2, your slow-thinking brain, is for the rare moments of caution, creativity, and mindfulness when you fully engage your decision-making abilities.) That autopilot kept our ancestors alive. It makes moving through our day so, so much easier. But it's also at the root of prejudice, bad choices with money, and political and financial manipulation. It's also the exact vulnerability that a system built to make your choices for you is perfectly suited to exploit, because your brain is wired to hand off effort wherever it can.The cost is already showing up. A UC Berkeley professor recently told me he spends most of his courses trying to convince freshmen that there's a real difference between reading a book and reading a chatbot's summary of one. Intake psychiatrists are quietly inventing codes for patients who arrive believing a chatbot's claim that they're Jesus, or a king.So I make the case for cognitive friction — for what one federal judge calls "weak perfection": the idea that a harder, slower process is what keeps a mind strong. Entering a guilty plea is a pain, yes, but that's a good thing, because that choice is permanent, and will change your life — and a system that makes the decision frictionless takes away your chance to put your best thinking into it.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E96
June 26 · 25 min
The Fight to Protect You Against AI (with Rep Sara Jacobs)
Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) just introduced the Sectoral AI Governance Act, a bill that would let federal agencies enforce existing laws — on housing, hiring, disability rights, benefits — when an algorithm is the one making the decision. It creates no new crimes. It's what she calls a "minimum viable product."I sat down with her to push on the hard parts: why the bill leans on agency power at the exact moment the Trump administration is stripping it and suing states over their AI laws; what it means that a $140 million super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI's president, and a Palantir co-founder is spending to beat candidates who back regulation; and why she keeps comparing AI to the early days of commercial aviation.We get into the evidentiary trap that makes algorithmic discrimination so hard to prove, her four-level map for governing AI, her fear of an AI "Fukushima," and her blunt fallback if Congress does nothing: the states.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E95
June 12 · 13 min
The First Stock Market Greed Machine
In 1602, Dutch merchants invented the stock market — and built it so no one who bought in could ever get their money back. Today, that same machine lists on the Nasdaq as SPCX.SpaceX just raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history — nearly triple the previous record. But strip away the size and look at what a share actually buys: no vote that can change anything, money the company keeps permanently, and one man holding 82% of the decisions. That structure wasn't invented by Elon Musk. It was invented four hundred years ago by a company that ran a private army, signed treaties with kings, and secured its monopoly through massacre.This is the story of the Dutch East India Company — the world's first IPO — and what it tells us about the machine being offered to the public today.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E94
June 9 · 21 min
The SpaceX IPO: Your Money, Musk's Kingdom
SpaceX goes public this Friday in what could be the largest IPO in the history of capitalism. But before you invest — or find out your 401(k) already has — there's something you should understand about what you're actually buying.Elon Musk's S-1 filing gives him 85.1% of the voting power in the combined SpaceX/xAI company. That means your money goes in, his rules stay permanent. This isn't a quirk of one founder's ego — it's the fullest expression yet of a two-decade market structure that Google started in 2004, that Meta and Snap refined, and that SpaceX is now applying to a company whose customers include NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and governments fighting active wars. In this video: the fourth rocket that shouldn't have worked. The profitable cash machine that became the wallet for a money-losing AI race. The compensation package that pays Musk out only if he colonizes Mars. The Danish pension fund and the S&P 500 committee that said no. And the man I watched in a federal courtroom in Oakland — not defending a business decision, but defending his place in history. A few weeks ago I covered the Musk v. Altman federal trial from the courthouse. What I saw there changed how I read this IPO. The full written analysis — with sourcing, further reading, and everything I couldn't fit here — is at TheRipCurrent.com.
S1 · E93
May 25 · 22 min
The Pope Slams Silicon Valley
Today the Vatican published Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical and the Catholic Church's official moral teaching on AI. I woke up at 5am to read it, and it's remarkable.It names algorithmic systems making decisions about credit, jobs, and welfare benefits. It names data extraction from poor countries as a new form of colonialism. It describes the invisible human labor underneath every AI response. And on autonomous weapons, it establishes a three-part accountability framework that maps directly onto the targeting systems the U.S. military is using right now. Never thought I'd feel true ideological kinship with the leader of the Catholic Church.135 years ago, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum — a document that named the horrors of industrial capitalism and eventually became part of the intellectual foundation for the New Deal. Leo XIV named himself after that, and he's trying to accomplish the same thing today.Whether it works depends on who carries it from here.My full written analysis — including a speculative bibliography of the tech journalism that may have shaped Leo's thinking — is at The Rip Current:🔗 https://www.theripcurrent.com/p/the-vaticans-indictment-of-aiMembers get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E92
May 22 · 17 min
OpenAI Is Going Public. Can It Survive the Market? Can We?
Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI was supposed to be a referendum on the company's soul — whether it had abandoned its founding promise to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. Instead, it was thrown out on a statute of limitations. Two days later, it's reported by the NYT, WSJ, and CNBC that OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO, perhaps this week. The company is valued at $852 billion — roughly 35 times its annualized revenue — and is projected to lose $14 billion in 2026 alone. Its own CFO has reportedly urged delaying until 2027. Sam Altman is pushing ahead anyway, likely because Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI are eyeing the same investor dollars. In this video, I look at what going public actually does to a company's principles — using Google and Facebook as the clearest historical examples — and why the fact that OpenAI's red lines have already moved, before a single earnings call, should worry all of us. Plus: what Andrej Karpathy's surprise move to Anthropic might tell us about where the serious research is actually happening. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at The Rip Current.
S1 · E91
May 18 · 11 min
Altman Wins in Court. What About the Rest of Us?
A jury in Oakland took less than two hours to dismiss Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI Monday morning. The verdict was on a narrow technicality — the statute of limitations — and didn't touch the substantive questions: whether Altman lied to co-founders, whether the nonprofit-to-profit conversion was a betrayal, whether the company violated the charitable trust Musk said he was funding.What closes with the case is the only real window the public has ever had into how the AI industry operates. The discovery documents generated by this lawsuit — Brockman's diaries, the Altman-Musk email chains, Sutskever's 52-page dossier — exist as public record only because adversarial litigation forced them into the open. That lever is now gone.I've been covering this trial from inside the Oakland courthouse since it started. This is my assessment of what the verdict actually forecloses — and what OpenAI's path to a trillion-dollar IPO looks like from here.For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E90
May 16 · 19 min
The CEOs Who Went to China and Got Nothing
Trump brought a dozen of America's most powerful CEOs to Beijing this week — Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and others — to meet with Xi Jinping. The optics were big. The results were not. And the whole experience was presumably a nightmare for Trump's emotional-support CEOs. Here's why: these companies aren't trying to expand into China. They're trying to hold onto what they already have — and in most cases, they're losing it anyway. Tim Cook has built Apple's entire supply chain around China. Nvidia has gone from 95% AI chip market share in China to nearly zero. Musk is trying to sell Teslas in a country that views Starlink as a military threat. The world that made Silicon Valley possible — the open-market, borderless-money era that began when China joined the WTO in 2001 — is over. And no amount of diplomatic face time with Xi Jinping, or plane rides with Trump, is going to bring it back. Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.
S1 · E89
May 14 · 13 min
Sam Altman Under Oath
I watched Sam Altman testify Tuesday, May 12th, in the Musk v. OpenAI trial in Oakland — his first and possibly only day on the stand. Within two minutes of cross-examination, Musk's attorney Stephen Molo was asking him point-blank whether he tells lies to advance his business interests. Altman's answers were careful to the point of being revealing: "I believe I'm a truthful person." Not: I am a truthful person. I believe I am. Read the testimony of OpenAI cofounders who described a "pattern of lying" from Altman here. The testimony produced a portrait of Altman that is hard to square with any single narrative. He described finding out Shivon Zilis — an OpenAI board member he'd kept around partly to smooth relations with Musk — had children with Musk only a year after the fact, and not learning Musk was the father until even later. Yet he kept Zilis as a board member. He recalled a 2018 meeting at a Tesla facility about OpenAI's corporate future that ended with Musk just showing everyone memes on his phone. He explained his return after being fired in 2023 as running "into a burning building" — while under oath, and while not mentioning the simultaneous Microsoft job negotiations or the conditions he extracted for coming back, including removing most of the board. The legal question, as Altman himself correctly stated near the end of cross, is narrow: did he breach a charitable trust, and was he unjustly enriched? The jury's verdict is advisory — Judge Yvette Gonzalez Rogers makes the call. And watching her tell billionaires what to do, and watching them say "yes, your honor," turned out to be the most clarifying thing about the whole proceeding.
S1 · E88
May 13 · 14 min
Sam Altman's Own Hero Calls Him a Liar. Now He Faces a Jury.
Ilya Sutskever — the AI researcher who helped build OpenAI and is widely credited with turning the transformer model into ChatGPT — took the stand on Monday and confirmed under oath that he spent a year assembling a 52-page dossier on Sam Altman’s conduct, concluding that Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.” That testimony follows sworn statements from former CTO Mira Murati, former board member Helen Toner, and former board member Tasha McCauley — all describing the same pattern. Altman is expected to take the stand today with all of that hanging over him. But here’s the thing: none of that may actually matter for the outcome of this case. I break down what the jury is actually being asked to decide, why Musk’s legal hill is steeper than it looks, and what Sutskever’s extraordinary testimony reveals about the people building the most consequential technology in the world.

Showing 1–20 of 23 episodes