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Elon Loses
00:20:06
The Musk v. Altman jury unanimously rejected Musk's claims on statute of limitations grounds. Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic's pre-training team. Polymarket partners with Nasdaq on private company markets, Blackstone and Google form a TPU venture, and KPMG embeds Claude into tax advisory.
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San Francisco on April 4, 2023. Around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App From Bloomberg Podcasts. This is Foundry, the killing of Bob Lee beginning April 16th. Welcome to the Tech Brew Right hunt for Tuesday, May 19, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today the Musk v. Altman jury rejected Musk's claims on statute of limitation grounds. Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic Polymarket is partnering with the NASDAQ on private company markets. Blackstone and Google form a TPU venture and KPMG embeds Claude into tax advisory here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Today's episode is brought to you by Doppl Social Engineering Attacks don't bother to knock. They slip right into your inbox phone or on websites instead, pretending to be harmless internal emails or a normal text message until it's too late. Doppl sees right through the disguises. Their AI native platform trains your team to recognize threats like deepfakes, bad links and impersonation attempts before they can actually cause any damage. Doppel strengthens team resilience by giving employees the tools and defenses they need to protect themselves from increasingly sophisticated social engineering threats. It's kind of like having a security team that has eyes everywhere, and their digital risk protection takes it one step further by keeping an eye on every channel to connect patterns and shut them down fast. Invest in your social engineering defenses. Learn more at D O P E l dot com that's D O P E l dot com well, as I said late yesterday, the jury came in yesterday and in the matter of Elon v. Sam, the jury unanimously rejected Elon Musk's claims against OpenAI and Sam Altman, saying that Musk filed those claims outside of a three year statute of limitations. Quoting cnbc. The advisory jury's verdict, which came after less than two hours of deliberations, was immediately adopted by District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The court did not address whether Musk's claims of breach of charitable trust were valid, but instead found they fell outside of a three year statute of limitations. Musk and his attorneys said they would appeal the verdict to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The end of the trial marked a loss for Musk in an early battle between two tech billionaires who were once close friends. In a post on his social network, X Musk called the decision a calendar technicality. There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman and Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a char. The only question is when they did it, he wrote. Musk's lawyer, Steven Molo, reserved his client's right to appeal directly to the judge. But the judge expressed her skepticism, noting that she was prepared to dismiss Musk's appeal on the spot. There's a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury's finding, she said in wrapping up the three week trial in Oakland, California. Outside the courthouse, another of Musk's lawyers, Mark Tobaroff, told cnbc, the case, quote, at its core is about preserving charities from this kind of exploitation. If they get away with with it, they shouldn't. It's not a technical decision, it's a substantive one. The lead attorney for OpenAI, William Savitt, told reporters. It says you brought your claims too late and you did it because you were sitting on them to use them as a weapon of a competitor who can't compete in the marketplace. And so we're delighted to get it, end quote. Counsel for OpenAI and Microsoft celebrated with hugs and back slaps as they departed the courtroom in downtown Oakland. The facts and the timeline in this case have long been clear and we welcome the jury's decision to dismiss these claims as untimely, an attorney for Microsoft said in a statement. We remain committed to our work with OpenAI to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world. Musk's team wanted the court to force OpenAI and Microsoft to give up as much as $180 billion in quote, ill gotten gains, to remove Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman from leadership and to unwind the company's 2025 restructuring that enabled the growth of its for profit arm. Musk said any money should be returned to the, quote, OpenAI charity rather than to him. At the heart of the case was Musk's claim that OpenAI executives, quote, stole a charity with Altman and Brockman abandoning OpenAI's founding charitable mission in pursuit of their own personal profit. Musk testified he gave roughly $38 million to OpenAI on the understanding it would develop AI, quote for the benefit of humanity, not to enrich any one person. Lawyers for OpenAI argued that Musk's donations were not restricted in any way and that restructuring the business was the only way to compete in a costly race against Google DeepMind. They also showed Musk had floated a for Prof. Structure on the condition that he retained control, even pushing the company at one point to fold into Tesla. End quote. You know, it did kind of strike me yesterday that we were all kind of assuming Musk wouldn't win this case, but we really didn't know, did we? Like, how close did this come? How insane would it have been if OpenAI had lost and had to pay damages or change structure or Sam Altman had to step down or something crazy like that? Quoting The Times if Mr. Musk had succeeded, OpenAI's plans to go public would have been caught in limbo. But now that its plans can move ahead, OpenAI faces significant business challenges. As OpenAI fights its rivals, it also faces myriad battles in the courts. Book authors, publishers and news organizations have all sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, claiming their copyrighted works were illegally used to train its AI systems. Many parents and other groups have sued the company for negligence and wrongful death, claiming that ChatGPT contributed to various suicides and school shootings. And despite Monday's decision, the company still faces a legal challenge from Mr. Musk because he and his lawyers said they would appeal. The judge and jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality, Mr. Musk said in a social media post. There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman and Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity. The only question is when they did it. Peter Mok, a law professor at the University of Florida who specializes in corporate structures, said that while Mr. Musk lost in court on Monday, there was still a chance this case could stir anger in the court of public opinion. And that, he said, could get the attention of the state attorneys general who approved the company's new for profit structure. This could raise some concerning flags that the state attorneys general could have a reason to revisit OpenAI's structure, he said. Kathryn Bracey, who helps lead a coalition of organizations called eyes on OpenAI, said people should continue to question OpenAI's restructuring as for profit. Ms. Bracey, who was in the courtroom for much of the trial, has long complained that California's Attorney General, Rob Bonta, allowed OpenAI's restructuring to move forward in light of the mounting evidence of OpenAI's unlawful abdication of its nonprofit mission. She said Mr. Banta must revisit his agreement with OpenAI, order an independent valuation of the nonprofit's assets, and compel their transfer to a truly independent charitable entity. End quote. This is an interesting and a big get. Andrej Karpathy has joined Anthropic to help launch a team focused on using Claude to accelerate so called pre training research. You know I quote from Andre all the time, but he helped found OpenAI and also worked at Tesla. He's kind of a big deal. Quoting TechCrunch pre training is responsible for the large scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to the company. It's also one of the most expensive compute intensive phases of building a Frontier model. An anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch that Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pre training research. Karpathy is one of the few researchers who can bridge the gap between LLM theory and large scale training practice. Tapping him to build such a team is a clear sign from Anthropic that it believes AI assisted research rather than pure compute is how it stays competitive with OpenAI and Google. While at OpenAI, Karpathy focused on deep learning and computer vision until he departed in 2017 to join Tesla. He led Tesla's full self driving or FSD and Autopilot programs before leaving in 2022. He then went back to OpenAI for one year before leaving again in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, a startup dedicated to applying AI assistance to education. Karpathy hasn't shared many updates on Eureka Labs since its launch and it's not clear if the renowned researcher will continue with the startup. He has also taught an online course called Neural Networks Zero to Hero that helps students learn to build neural networks from scratch in code, and he has a YouTube channel where he semi regularly posts lectures on LLMs and AI separately. Anthropic has also brought on Chris Rolf to its Frontier Red team which stress test advanced AI models against severe threats. Rolf is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry with more than 20 years of experience. He previously worked at Yahoo's well respected cybersecurity team known as the Paranoids and more recently at Meta, where he worked for six years. Before joining Anthropic, Rolf was also a fellow at Georgetown's center for Security and Emerging Technology where he worked on the Cyber AI project. We have a real opportunity in front of us to dramatically improve cybersecurity with AI, rolf said in a post on X. I can't think of a better company or team to join at this critical moment in time. End quote. Father's Day is right around the corner. Celebrate the dads in your life with Viori. Their Father's Day gift guide features the newest and best selling styles dad will want to wear on repeat. From the fairway to the airport to the gym, Vuory's everyday staples are ready for wherever the day takes him. With fitness, go to's Performance Essentials and Travel Ready layers, you can gear him up for his next adventure in one place. Get 20% off your first order at viori.com techbrew that's viori.com tech exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. Given how long it took crypto to get accepted by mainstream finance, I'm sort of surprised how quickly prediction markets have been adopted by mainstream finance. Although I guess crypto walked so prediction markets could run polymarket is partnering with Nasdaq to launch markets tied to private company milestones, including IPO timings, valuations, earnings and secondary market activity. Quoting the block, Polymarket announced on Tuesday that it is launching a new category of prediction markets tied to private company milestones. The crypto native prediction market platform said the new offerings will exclusively source resolution data from NASDAQ Private Market via a new partnership between the two. Prediction markets are one of the most powerful tools we have for democratizing access to financial information and opportunity, shane Copland said in a statement. Today's launch brings that power to one of the last frontiers of financial markets that retail participants have never been able to access. The launch comes as crypto platform are expanding and experimenting with their own products tied to private company valuations and IPO expectations. Earlier this month, the hyper liquid based Trade XYZ platform rolled out pre IPO perpetual futures tied to companies like cerebras and Elon Musk's SpaceX. Its goal is to turn private market sentiment into tradable on chain markets. However, polymarket's new offerings focus more on event contracts tied to milestones and outcomes rather than equity ownership. Early markets seen on the new tab on polymarket include contracts tied to companies like OpenAI, anthropic stripe databricks and Kraken, reaching specific valuation thresholds by certain dates. We know that the major constraint in the AI race so far, or at least right now, is compute. So with the big Capex build out, the world's giant pools of money are like let's just get into the business of selling compute. Blackstone has announced a joint venture with Google to create a standalone US Company that will offer customers Google TPU access and is making a $5 billion initial equity commitment to the project. Quoting the journal, the venture the biggest attempt yet by Google to sell and monetize its own chips to external parties will sharpen a rivalry with Nvidia, the market leader in AI computing. The new company aims in 2027 to bring 500 megawatts of capacity online, roughly the same amount of electric power required to serve a mid sized city, and substantially increase capacity over time. Google and Blackstone said the companies are forming the venture as demand for computing power to train and run advanced AI models reaches unprecedented levels. Most of the major AI companies currently rely at least in part on computing infrastructure from CoreWeave, which uses Nvidia's chips. A class of smaller so called neo cloud companies have also cropped up. In response to ravenous demand, Google last month introduced a new processor that is customized for AI inference or the computing required to run models rather than train them. Demand for that type of processing has exploded as businesses embrace AI. Google has also introduced a new version of its chips that is specially designed for training models. Google will supply the hardware, including its specialized chips known as tensor processing units, or TPUs, as well as software and services to the venture. Benjamin Trainer Sloss, a longtime Google executive, will serve as the new company's CEO. Blackstone will be the majority owner, people familiar with the matter said, and is expected to support around $25 billion in compute investments, including leverage. Google and Blackstone have identified data centers that will likely be part of the venture, some of which are in the process of being built, the people said. Industry observers have wondered for years whether Google will commercialize its TPUs for widespread use. The technology giant has signed two major deals with outsiders, one to give Claude maker Anthropic access to about 1 million of its chips, and another with Facebook owner Meta Platforms. Blackstone is one of Wall Street's most active investors in AI and counts itself as the world's largest provider of data centers. In 2021, it struck a deal to buy data center operator QTS Reality Trust, and in 2024 it agreed to buy data center operator AirTrunk. The firm has also made significant investments in Core, Weave, Anthropic and OpenAI, among other AI related companies. Blackstone Chairman and Chief Executive Steven Schwarzman has been active in the AI field for over a decade and said on a recent earnings call that the firm has more than $150 billion in data center assets, including sites under construction, with an additional $160 billion in potential new projects, end quote. Finally today, it's interesting to see how this is going to shake out. If AI is essentially just intelligence on demand, will we see different startups building different types of intelligence products? Will we see incumbent companies just adding intelligence to their existing products. We've seen both happening over and over again over the past few years. But then there is the original vision that probably the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI I sold to investors. We the big LLM companies will just provide intelligence as a service to everyone. Here's an example of that KPMG has partnered with Anthropic to embed Claude into its tax and advisory platforms. KPMG's tax and legal services unit saw revenue grow around 8% last year to $9.3 billion. Quoting the Journal, KPMG employees and clients will be able to use CLAUDE to create materials, build agents and summarize documents, the firm said. The platform that houses all tax and legal client data and internal analys will have CLAUDE embedded in it on top of existing Microsoft Azure. KPMG is moving some advisory work on this CLAUDE centric platform and aims to utilize it by the end of September. The firm plans to eventually shift more advisory work to the platform from its existing one, meaning CLAUDE will span the workflows of two of KPMG's three service lines. Auditors won't see CLAUDE integrated directly into their core workflows or client delivery systems, but they will still receive general access to the broader CLAUDE suite alongside the rest of the global firm. Total roughly 276,000 people. The big four firm said it expects significant time savings as tasks that used to take weeks, such as building a tool to adjust to new tax rules, will be done in minutes. This is not a chatbot layered on top of an existing tool, said Rema Sarafi, KPMG's US Vice President of tax. Our people and our clients are going to be working very differently because the way they work is going to be accelerated in terms of the sophistication and the use and the ways that they innovate. Under the deal, Anthropic picked KPMG as the preferred consultant to help it advise private equity firms and their portfolio companies. That's part of Anthropic's larger plan to help PE firms and their portfolio of businesses use AI to update their software and speed up their daily operations. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.