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Elon Musk loses lawsuit against OpenAI in unanimous verdict
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Judge Dismisses Musk's OpenAI Lawsuit After Jury Reaches Verdict
Update: Musk to appeal
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A nine-person federal jury has sided with OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft, determining that Elon Musk filed his high-profile lawsuit too late under the statute of limitations. The verdict effectively ends Musk’s claims that OpenAI abandoned its founding nonprofit mission to benefit humanity.
The jury unanimously concluded that Musk knew or should have known about OpenAI’s shift toward a for-profit model and major Microsoft partnerships years earlier - potentially as far back as 2019–2021, making his August 2024 filing untimely. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in turn accepted the advisory jury’s finding on this threshold issue and dismissed the case.
Musk, a co-founder who contributed roughly $38–44 million in OpenAI’s early days, alleged that the company betrayed its original charitable trust by pursuing massive profits and commercial deals, particularly with Microsoft. He sought up to $150 billion in damages or “ill-gotten gains,” the removal of Altman and Brockman from leadership, and a restructuring to restore the nonprofit focus on safe, humanity-benefiting AI.
OpenAI countered that Musk was fully aware of the company’s evolving plans (including for-profit elements he himself had once advocated), waited until after launching his competing xAI venture in 2023, and was motivated by competitive rivalry rather than genuine concern for the mission. They described the suit as “sour grapes.”
Developing...
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/18/2026 - 13:38Judge Tosses Key Evidence In Luigi Mangione Case Over Warrantless Backpack Search
A judge just handed Luigi Mangione some big wins in his high-profile murder case. On Monday, New York Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro issued a mixed ruling on evidence seized during the suspect’s dramatic arrest at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. The decision represents a partial victory for the defense on constitutional grounds while delivering a significant boost to prosecutors by preserving the most damning pieces of physical evidence linking Mangione to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Mangione, 28, appeared in court for the hearing, dressed sharply as he has throughout proceedings. He has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and other charges in the Dec. 4, 2024, killing that shocked the nation and ignited fierce public debate over corporate greed in the American healthcare system.
The Arrest and the Evidence at StakeThe ruling stems from Mangione’s arrest on Dec. 9, 2024, in Altoona, Pennsylvania - roughly 280 miles from the Manhattan crime scene. Police responded to a tip after Mangione was recognized while eating breakfast. Officers approached him, and what followed became the focal point of lengthy suppression hearings held late last year.
During the initial encounter at the McDonald’s, officers conducted a warrantless search of Mangione’s backpack in a public setting, visible to restaurant employees and patrons. They discovered a loaded gun magazine wrapped in underwear and other items. The search was paused, and Mangione was taken to the Altoona police station, where a more formal inventory search occurred.
Justice Carro ruled that the initial McDonald’s search was improper - an unconstitutional warrantless intrusion because the backpack was not within Mangione’s immediate control or reach at the time. As a result, several items recovered during that phase are now suppressed and inadmissible in the state trial.
The Ditched Evidence Includes:
- Loaded handgun magazine
- Cellphone
- Passport
- Wallet
- Computer chip
- Certain initial statements made by Mangione to officers at the scene
However, the judge found the subsequent search at the police station valid, allowing prosecutors to use critical items recovered there.
Admissible Key Evidence:
- The alleged murder weapon: A 3D-printed “ghost gun” with a silencer, which ballistics reportedly match to shell casings found at the crime scene.
- A red notebook containing handwritten notes expressing deep frustration with the health insurance industry—often described in media as a “manifesto.”
- USB drive and related items from the station search.
This split decision mirrors similar outcomes in Mangione’s separate federal case and underscores the complexities of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in high-stakes arrests.
The Crime That Captivated AmericaTo understand the ruling’s weight, one must revisit the events of December 2024. On the morning of Dec. 4, Brian Thompson, 50, a father of two and CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down in cold blood outside the New York Hilton Midtown. He was heading to an investors’ conference when a masked assailant approached from behind and fired multiple shots. Thompson was struck in the back and leg; he died shortly after.
The killer fled on a bicycle, leaving behind shell casings engraved with the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” - phrases widely interpreted as a pointed critique of insurance industry practices that deny claims and delay care. Surveillance video, fingerprints, DNA, and other forensic links quickly pointed investigators toward Mangione, a 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate from a well-to-do Maryland family with a background in engineering.
Mangione’s arrest five days later, with a fake ID and a backpack full of incriminating items, ended a intense manhunt. His Ivy League education, handsome appearance, and apparent grievances against corporate America turned him into an unlikely folk hero for some. Protests, “Free Luigi” chants, and online memes have accompanied the case from the start, reflecting broader societal anger over healthcare costs, claim denials, and corporate profiteering.
Legal Strategy and ImplicationsFor the defense, led by prominent attorneys, the suppression motion was a cornerstone of their strategy. By challenging the backpack search, they hoped to dismantle much of the prosecution’s physical case. While they secured wins on peripheral items, the admission of the gun and notebook is a heavy blow. The notebook, in particular, could allow prosecutors to argue motive and premeditation before a jury.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office hailed the ruling as preserving justice for a “premeditated, targeted” killing. Bragg has emphasized that additional evidence - beyond the backpack - ties Mangione to the scene, including video footage, ballistics, and witness identifications.
Legal experts describe the outcome as a classic “partial win” scenario. Defense attorneys may appeal the admissible evidence or challenge statements under Miranda rules (the judge also addressed Huntley issues regarding voluntariness of statements). However, with the weapon and writings intact, the state’s case remains formidable.
The state trial is scheduled to begin September 8, 2026, in Manhattan Criminal Court. A separate federal case, charging stalking and other counts, carries potential life sentences but no death penalty following an earlier federal ruling. Mangione remains detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/18/2026 - 13:30Bloodthirsty Luigi Mangione ‘reporters’ unapologetically celebrate CEO’s assassination: ‘F—k Brian Thompson. F—k his mom’
The Lines We Thought Machines Wouldn't Cross
Authored by George Ford Smith via The Mises Institute,
In 2000, the world braced for Y2K. It came with a date and a remedy. There was panic about doomsday but as I and other programmers stretched the year field from two to four characters, apart from scattered hiccups, the lights stayed on. Everything about Y2K was known - the problem, the solution, and the deadline.
Q-Day is something else entirely.
Q-Day is shorthand for the moment when quantum computing crosses a line we assumed would hold—when the mathematics that secures modern life can be broken, and broken quickly. On Q-Day the locks will be quietly and rapidly picked. And the unsettling part is that the thief may already have your safe, waiting for the day the combination becomes trivial to compute.
Today’s encryption is a lock that would take an ordinary zeros-and-ones computer longer than the age of the universe—26.7 billion years—to pick. The most widely-used system—RSA with a 2,048-bit key—relies on the virtual impossibility of factoring “the product of two very large prime numbers.”
A sufficiently advanced quantum computer, however, would not try every possible combination. It would use a fundamentally different method—one discovered by MIT mathematician Peter Shor—to solve the problem efficiently. What is impossible today would become routine. The world’s assumption of security would no longer hold.
Data stolen today—bank records, corporate secrets, medical files, state communications—can be stored until the day it becomes readable, what analysts call “harvest now, decrypt later.” It gives today’s thieves a speculative claim on tomorrow’s knowledge. But, like all speculative claims, its value depends on time, uncertainty, and the actions of others. The longer the delay, the more likely the data is obsolete, replaced, or secured in a different manner or place.
There is no agreement about when Q-Day will likely arrive. “Google thinks it could happen by 2029, while Adi Shamir—one of the cryptography experts behind the development of RSA encryption—believes it’s at least 30 years away.”
Meanwhile, something else is headed our way:
The technological singularity, the point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins improving itself in an unstoppable loop, is most commonly predicted to arrive between 2035 and 2045. That window has been shrinking. A few years ago, most experts placed it decades away. Now, some of the most prominent voices in AI believe the precursor step, artificial general intelligence (AGI), could arrive before 2030.
Singularity futurists might be overlooking technical obstacles in their projections, such as the failure of intelligence to scale at the projected magnitude, but Q-Day’s arrival seems fairly certain. It brings into view several themes familiar to students of Austrian School economics.
First, the knowledge problem. As Hayek emphasized, the information required to coordinate complex systems is dispersed, qualitative, and often tacit. No central planner can know when Q-Day will arrive or which systems are most exposed in real time. Mandates that assume a timetable risk misallocating resources. By contrast, decentralized actors—banks, firms, developers—can respond to price signals, insurance costs, vendor competition, and evolving threat intelligence.
Second, incentives and time preference. Security spending is the classic case of a present cost for a future benefit. The payoff is the loss you never incur. In a world of quarterly reports and countless distractions, the temptation is to defer. Yet the nature of Q-Day flips the calculus: the cost of delay compounds because the exposure window is long and the fix is slow. Systems are not swapped overnight. Keys must be rotated, protocols updated, hardware replaced, staff retrained. The discipline required here is precisely what Austrian analysis highlights: aligning incentives so that long-term preservation of capital is not sacrificed to short-term appearance.
Third, capital structure. Information systems are capital goods with long lives and complex interdependencies. When firms procrastinate and then rush, investment bunches up under pressure—an IT version of malinvestment. By contrast, building crypto-agility—the ability to swap cryptographic components without tearing down the whole system—is a form of sound capital planning. It spreads costs over time and reduces the risk of a frantic, error-prone scramble later.
Fourth, property rights and trust. In a digital economy, encryption is not a luxury; it is part of the institutional framework that makes exchange possible. If signatures can be forged and identities spoofed, claims to ownership—of accounts, contracts, even money—are weakened. The invisible infrastructure of trust becomes visible precisely when it fails. Q-Day, if mishandled, would not merely be a technical glitch; it could turn the reliability of exchange itself into a disaster.
Fifth, competition. If a single, mandated solution fails, it fails system-wide. A free-market approach—multiple implementations, open standards, independent audits, competing vendors—reduces single points of failure and encourages faster discovery of weaknesses.
One more point. We often draw comfort from lines we believe machines will not cross, but occasionally those lines move. Q-Day is one such movement. It does not herald the end of privacy or the collapse of commerce, any more than Y2K heralded the end of computing. But it does force us to confront a truth Austrians have long emphasized: Complex orders endure not because they are guaranteed, but because they are maintained—by incentives, by institutions, and by continual adaptation to changing knowledge.
And, as long as we still have the power to act purposely, the singularity, if it comes about, will represent a higher level of human intelligence and human life generally. It will not be something we will passively accept. Cost-benefit considerations will always apply, as will our moral sense of what is right. As Ray Kurzweil has written,
Since AI is emerging from a deeply integrated economic infrastructure, it will reflect our values because in an important sense it will be us. We are already a human-machine civilization. Ultimately, the most important approach we can take to keep AI safe is to protect and improve on our human governance and social institutions.
And as I have argued elsewhere, our human governance institution is in need of radical revision.
Tyler Durden Mon, 05/18/2026 - 13:15