Elon Musk and Sam Altman are two of the most influential people in Silicon Valley, if not the world. Between the two of them, Musk and Altman run technology companies worth many trillions of dollars that promise to reshape civilization. But this morning, both sat under fluorescent lights in a courthouse in downtown Oakland, suffering through all manner of technical glitches as their respective attorneys kicked off the long-awaited trial in Musk v. Altman. As Steven Molo, a lawyer for Musk, began his opening argument, confused looks swept the courtroom. 'We can't hear you,' Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said. Someone fixed his microphone. Later, as Molo began to call into question Altman's integrity, his microphone cut out again, and his presentation disappeared from screens in the room. ('We are funded by the federal government,' Gonzalez Rogers joked. 'The judiciary is happy to take more funds.') Musk is suing Altman and OpenAI, among others, demanding legal and financial remedies that would effectively destroy OpenAI as we know it. The fight stretches back to 2015, when Musk partnered with Altman to create OpenAI out of concern, as they told it, that Google DeepMind could not be trusted to create artificial general intelligence. Corporate greed would get in the way of societal progress, they claimed, so OpenAI would be a nonprofit. After a falling out with Altman and other co-founders, Musk left in 2018. All of this was before OpenAI added a for-profit entity, and before ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history. In 2024, Musk sued, alleging that by putting profits above its founding mission, OpenAI had violated its founding charter and misused Musk's initial charitable donations. 'It's very simple,' Musk testified today. 'It's not okay to steal a charity.' Also named in his complaint are the OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and Microsoft, a major investor in the company....

Among the most interesting parts of Elon Musk's testimony Tuesday in his lawsuit against OpenAI wasn't the charity he claims was stolen from him (we all knew that was coming). It was about an old friend. Musk testified that one of his core motivations for co-founding OpenAI was a falling-out with Google's Larry Page over AI safety ' specifically, a conversation in which Musk raised the prospect of AI wiping out humanity and Page shrugged it off as 'fine,' so long as AI itself survived. Page called Musk a 'speciest' for being 'pro human.' Musk called the attitude 'insane.' That's mostly notable given how close the two once were. Fortune included them on its 2016 list of secretly best-friend business leaders; Musk was so comfortable with Page that he regularly crashed at his Palo Alto home. Page once told Charlie Rose that he'd rather give his money to Musk than to charity. It's a story Musk has told before ' including to author Walter Isaacson for his bestselling biography of Musk ' but Tuesday was the first time he said it under oath. Page hasn't commented, and it's worth remembering everything that Musk said was in service of a lawsuit. Still, as recently as 2023 he told tech podcaster Lex Fridman he wanted to patch things up: 'We were friends for a very long time.'...

X Chat's standalone app isn't the only new service X is testing this week. The company has also begun offering select users invites to its X Money payments service, which was previously being tested internally among X employees. These invites, however, were not doled out in the typical way. Instead, X owner Elon Musk worked with William Shatner (yes, the actor) to invite people into the beta in exchange for a $1,000 donation to Shatner's charity that supports children's and veterans' organizations. On X, the 'Star Trek' actor has been sharing information about the X Money service and its beta invites, which were made available via an online auction on Monday. Musk reshared one of Shatner's posts to his own feed, saying simply 'X Money.' Musk also reposted another user's post about X Money, adding, 'This will be big.' The auction, Shatner noted, was conducted with Musk's blessing after Shatner received payment from Musk via the X Money app. (A screenshot showed that Musk sent him $42, a playful sci-fi reference: The number is, in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams, the computed answer to the meaning of life.)...

Researchers have unveiled plans to investigate the mysterious production of 'dark oxygen' on the sea floor ' large amounts of the gas that seem to be coming from a region too deep for sunlight to power photosynthesis. The discovery of the oxygen 4,000 metres below the surface of the Pacific Ocean was first published in 2024 in Nature Geoscience1. The team behind it is embarking on a fresh series of studies to verify their findings and establish what could be causing the phenomenon. At a press conference in London last week, the researchers unveiled a suite of instruments specifically designed to look at oxygen production, either on the sea floor or in laboratory experiments that reproduce deep-sea conditions, including 400 atmospheres of pressure. The Nippon Foundation, a Tokyo-based charity, is funding the follow-up studies with a grant of US$5.2 million. By May, project scientists will travel to the Clarion'Clipperton Zone ' the region between Hawaii and Mexico where the original discovery was made ' aboard the research vessel Nautilus. Speaking at the event, team leader Andrew Sweetman, a sea-floor ecologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban, UK, described two probes ' each with different capabilities ' designed to land on the sea floor to take measurements and samples....