A famous logic puzzle takes place on a mythical island divided between the knights, who never lie, and the knaves, who always do. A foreign traveller encounters a fork in the road: one way guarantees safe passage, the other certain death. A member of each tribe is present, though it isn’t clear which is which, and the traveller is granted only one question. The solution is well known: ask either of them what the other would advise, and then to choose the opposite path. (An accurate account of a lie and an inaccurate account of the truth amount to the same wrong answer.) But this works only if someone is honest. What if nobody can be trusted? The Cretan philosopher Epimenides inspired an alternative scenario set on his own island, when he supposedly said that “all Cretans are liars.” Logicians call unstable statements like these “self-referential paradoxes,” or utterances that undermine their own claims. Epimenides would presumably have felt at home at the trial of Musk v. Altman, which over the past few weeks turned an Oakland courtroom into an island of lying cretins.

In theory, the trial was about the good-faith control of artificial intelligence. In 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman founded OpenAI together as a nonprofit. Its mission—“to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”—was explicitly intended to counter Google’s potential dominance of the technology, which seemed almost foreordained at the time. Musk pledged up to a billion dollars to prevent that outcome. It didn’t take long for the two men to disagree over the chain of command. Each thought he alone deserved to run the show. About two years and thirty-eight million dollars later, Musk took his remaining nine hundred and sixty-odd million dollars and went home. In his valedictory e-mail, he wrote, “My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.” OpenAI needed another source of largesse. With investors in mind, it opened a for-profit subsidiary and secured billions of dollars from Microsoft and others. This past October, the company completed a lengthy process of restructuring and recapitalization. Today, the subsidiary is worth something close to a trillion dollars.

Musk’s lawsuit alleged that Altman, along with other OpenAI executives and in collusion with Microsoft, “stole a charity.” He believes that they solicited his generosity on false pretenses, exploiting the cover of a humanitarian cause to build one of the world’s most valuable companies, and, in the process, enriching themselves beyond measure. The remedies he sought include the unwinding of OpenAI’s transformation into a for-profit company, the disgorgement of a hundred and fifty billion dollars in damages to be paid to the original nonprofit, and the final exile of Altman from the organization. It would effectively destroy the venture as such. The suit was an act of vengeance, and its primary function seemed to be to make everyone involved look heinous.