At his OpenAI trial, Musk relitigates an old friendship

If you’ve been loosely following the tech world lately, you might have heard that Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. This week he took the witness stand and told his version of how OpenAI got started — essentially that he helped fund and build it with the understanding it would stay nonprofit and open to the public, and then felt betrayed when it cozied up to Microsoft and started behaving more like a regular for-profit company. Think of it like co-founding a community garden with your neighbors, agreeing everything grown there would be shared freely, and then one day showing up to find someone has fenced it off and opened a farm stand. Musk says he never agreed to that pivot. OpenAI says he’s rewriting history.

What makes this interesting beyond the celebrity drama is what it reveals about where AI power and money actually live. A small handful of companies — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta — are essentially building the infrastructure that everyone else will use. When founders fight over who controls those tools and under what terms, it affects prices, access, and competition for everybody. It’s a bit like watching two people argue over who owns the town’s only water tower. The outcome genuinely matters for regular people, even if the courtroom gossip is more fun to follow.

So how does any of this actually help you?

First, follow the lawsuit’s progress loosely. If Musk wins on arguments about OpenAI’s nonprofit obligations, it could push AI pricing lower or force more open access to models. That’s a real reason to watch for cheaper or free tiers on AI tools you might already pay for.

Second, if you run a small business, right now is actually a smart time to compare AI tool subscriptions before the market settles. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others are all competing aggressively for users. Lock in annual pricing while competition keeps costs down.

Third, consider learning one AI tool well enough to use it for something that currently costs you money — writing product descriptions, drafting emails, summarizing long documents, creating social media posts. Freelancers charge real money for all of these. Even saving two or three hours a week adds up fast.

The boardroom battles are worth knowing about, but the practical move is to use the competition those battles create to get better tools for less money while companies are still fighting for your attention.