The OpenAI lawsuit became a master class in what not to put in writing

Elon Musk’s loss in his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, decided on Monday by a jury and upheld by a judge, wasn’t the only damaging revelation to emerge from the California courtroom. The two-week trial also punctured the carefully managed public images of some of the most prominent figures shaping AI for hundreds of millions of people.

Whether it was Musk’s combative texts to Altman threatening to make “[Altman and Brockman] the most hated men in America” if OpenAI refused to settle, co-defendant Greg Brockman’s painfully earnest diary entries about becoming a billionaire (“Financially, what will take me to $1B?”), or Mira Murati’s anxious messages to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as OpenAI’s boardroom coup unraveled, executives who had spent years projecting total control were revealed to be far more human, and far messier, than they intended. (Microsoft owns a 27% stake in OpenAI.)

The case was “a reminder that discovery can be the real trial. In this case, hundreds of emails, texts, Slack messages, and private diary entries from years back were aired publicly and often unflatteringly,” says Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.

For executives watching from boardrooms, and perhaps even for some sitting in the courtroom itself, the takeaway was straightforward: Nothing is ever private.

Lawyers and HR executives have long warned against treating corporate messaging platforms as places to joke, vent, or trade sarcastic barbs. That lesson played out repeatedly during the trial. Among the central figures, Nadella largely escaped the most embarrassing disclosures, thanks in part to his reluctance to commit thoughts to writing. Documents introduced at trial showed him to be comparatively restrained and opaque, even in internal discussions over replacing (and ultimately reinstating) Altman.

Nadella’s relative silence suggested a lesson others in the industry may have ignored: it is often safer to pick up the phone than fire off texts or emails. “You just have to assume that everything you write is going to be revealed at some point,” says Nell Minow, chair of ValueEdge Advisors and a corporate governance advocate.

Whether the public airing of those private conversations will meaningfully change executive behavior is another question. That’s because, according to Minow, executives like Musk and Altman are shaped by a “go fast, break things, clean up the mess later” culture that does not lend itself to restraint.

Maura R. Grossman, an e-discovery specialist and University of Waterloo professor, sees the disclosures as part of a broader shift in elite behavior. “It has somehow become acceptable for people in positions of power to say things that would never have been deemed acceptable a decade ago,” she says. Most ordinary people, she adds, understand that texts and written communications can eventually surface. The fact that so many key players in the OpenAI saga appeared unconcerned by that possibility says plenty on its own.

Musk may still view the disclosures as a kind of Pyrrhic victory if they succeeded in publicly embarrassing his rivals. But Minow says the lesson isn’t to stop putting anything in writing at all. Excessive caution around written communication, she argues, risks undermining candid internal debate and eroding institutional memory. Without documentation, organizations lose out on a paper trail that can be useful in the event that something goes wrong within a firm, and enables observers or law enforcement to establish what went wrong and why.

Cornell University’s Kreps argues the smarter response is not to write less, but to write with greater discipline. “Document intent, options, rationale without the snark or speculation,” she says. Otherwise, companies risk replacing accountability with verbal-only decision-making and opaque governance.

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