The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

Trump brought a dozen of America's most powerful CEOs to Beijing this week — Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and others — to meet with Xi Jinping. The optics were big. The results were not. And the whole experience was presumably a nightmare for Trump's emotional-support CEOs.

Here's why: these companies aren't trying to expand into China. They're trying to hold onto what they already have — and in most cases, they're losing it anyway. Tim Cook has built Apple's entire supply chain around China. Nvidia has gone from 95% AI chip market share in China to nearly zero. Musk is trying to sell Teslas in a country that views Starlink as a military threat.

The world that made Silicon Valley possible — the open-market, borderless-money era that began when China joined the WTO in 2001 — is over. And no amount of diplomatic face time with Xi Jinping, or plane rides with Trump, is going to bring it back.

Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

I watched Sam Altman testify Tuesday, May 12th, in the Musk v. OpenAI trial in Oakland — his first and possibly only day on the stand. Within two minutes of cross-examination, Musk's attorney Stephen Molo was asking him point-blank whether he tells lies to advance his business interests. Altman's answers were careful to the point of being revealing: "I believe I'm a truthful person." Not: I am a truthful person. I believe I am.

Read the testimony of OpenAI cofounders who described a "pattern of lying" from Altman here.

The testimony produced a portrait of Altman that is hard to square with any single narrative. He described finding out Shivon Zilis — an OpenAI board member he'd kept around partly to smooth relations with Musk — had children with Musk only a year after the fact, and not learning Musk was the father until even later. Yet he kept Zilis as a board member.

He recalled a 2018 meeting at a Tesla facility about OpenAI's corporate future that ended with Musk just showing everyone memes on his phone. He explained his return after being fired in 2023 as running "into a burning building" — while under oath, and while not mentioning the simultaneous Microsoft job negotiations or the conditions he extracted for coming back, including removing most of the board.

The legal question, as Altman himself correctly stated near the end of cross, is narrow: did he breach a charitable trust, and was he unjustly enriched? The jury's verdict is advisory — Judge Yvette Gonzalez Rogers makes the call. And watching her tell billionaires what to do, and watching them say "yes, your honor," turned out to be the most clarifying thing about the whole proceeding.

Ilya Sutskever — the AI researcher who helped build OpenAI and is widely credited with turning the transformer model into ChatGPT — took the stand on Monday and confirmed under oath that he spent a year assembling a 52-page dossier on Sam Altman’s conduct, concluding that Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.”

That testimony follows sworn statements from former CTO Mira Murati, former board member Helen Toner, and former board member Tasha McCauley — all describing the same pattern. Altman is expected to take the stand today with all of that hanging over him.

But here’s the thing: none of that may actually matter for the outcome of this case. I break down what the jury is actually being asked to decide, why Musk’s legal hill is steeper than it looks, and what Sutskever’s extraordinary testimony reveals about the people building the most consequential technology in the world.

I spent two days inside the federal courthouse in Oakland, California, watching Elon Musk get examined and cross-examined in his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. The case turns on a founding betrayal — Musk put in $38 million on the understanding that OpenAI would stay a nonprofit, and discovery documents suggest the conversion to for-profit was already being planned while he was still writing checks.

But this trial is about more than one lawsuit. Congress investigated AI and passed no regulations. The FTC looked at AI market concentration and retreated. The California AG signed off on OpenAI's nonprofit conversion without a fight. The fastest-growing company in corporate history is now having its fate decided by nine jurors drawn from Oakland's voter rolls — and that jury may be the only formal accountability mechanism the AI industry has ever faced.

In this video: what it was like to be in the room, what the Brockman diary entries actually show, what Musk's attorneys are really arguing, and why this trial matters far beyond the $38 million at stake.

For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

Jury selection began today in Oakland in Musk v. Altman — the trial that could determine the future of OpenAI, one of the most powerful companies ever built. But the most important story isn't the legal arguments. It's the private record: the emails, texts, and diary entries that the founders of the AI industry wrote when they thought no one was reading.

In this video I walk through every significant document that has come out of discovery — Greg Brockman's private diary (with the line "then it was a lie"), Elon Musk's email calling Jeff Bezos "a bit of a tool," Sam Altman texting Musk "you're my hero" while preparing to fight him in court, Shivon Zilis asking Musk whether she should "keep info flowing" from inside OpenAI's board, and Mark Zuckerberg privately offering to suppress criticism of DOGE and proposing a joint bid on OpenAI's assets.

Every quote is sourced to the public court record. Links to primary documents are in the written piece at TheRipCurrent.com.

For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

Jury selection began today in Oakland in Musk v. Altman — the trial that will determine whether OpenAI, now valued at $730 billion, was built on fraud. I shot this from the steps of the federal courthouse, which is a short bike ride from my house, because I wanted to say something specific about who is actually in that building and why it matters.Congress has held AI hearings. No legislation. The FTC investigated AI companies. No binding rules. The California AG reviewed OpenAI's conversion from nonprofit to for-profit and approved it. The institutions that were supposed to exercise oversight have declined to. What's left is a civil lawsuit, decided by nine people from Oakland who had nothing to do with building the AI industry and everything to do with living inside it.Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Mira Murati will all testify. Nine jurors will decide what it means.For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

In July 2025, Anthropic became the first AI company inside the U.S. military's classified computer networks. By February 2026, the Pentagon had labeled it a national security threat, Trump had ordered the whole government off it, and a federal judge had called the blacklisting "Orwellian." By April 2026, an appeals court let the blacklist stand.Four days ago, Axios reported — confirmed by TechCrunch and CNBC — that the National Security Agency is actively using Anthropic's newest and most powerful AI model anyway. The NSA is part of the Department of Defense. The same department arguing in court that Anthropic's tools threaten national security is running those tools in live intelligence operations right now.This piece traces the parallel to GPS: how the military wove it into everything after the Gulf War, let the backup skills disappear, and discovered what that cost when Russia started jamming the signal in Ukraine. The AI dependency is less than a year old and it's already complete. The Pentagon's own lawyer said so in court.For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

A new Pew survey and a viral Stanford study are being used to suggest social media barely harms teenagers. The numbers in both are smaller than the headlines suggest — and neither has access to the data that would settle the question.That data does exist, however. It's just inside Meta's servers. NYU researchers have now catalogued 35 internal Meta studies from whistleblowers and litigation discovery. What those studies found — 13% of 13-to-15-year-olds reporting weekly unwanted sexual advances, one in three teen girls experiencing worse body image, Mark Zuckerberg noting internally that "3 percent of billions of people is a lot of people" — is different in kind from what external academics can measure.The external science isn't weak because researchers aren't trying. It's limited because the companies won't share the data. And the companies cite that limited external science in their own defense.For written reports, including all the source documents, please become a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

In 1925, thousands of Stetson Corporation employees gathered in a Philadelphia factory auditorium for their Christmas celebration. It was the largest hat factory in the world: 1.4 million square feet, 5,000 employees, 3.3 million hats a year. By 1986, the company was bankrupt. Stetson didn't lose to a better hat. The world stopped wearing hats.That's the frame for understanding what Tim Cook is leaving behind. Cook built Apple into the most profitable company in American history — $4 trillion market cap, $416 billion in annual revenue, a gross margin of 46.9% — by mastering three conditions: cheap Chinese manufacturing, the App Store's 15–30% commission on every digital transaction, and the iPhone's cultural grip as the gateway to all of it.All three are now in question simultaneously. Tariffs and geopolitical pressure are destabilizing the supply chain. Agentic AI threatens to route around the App Store entirely. And competitors from OpenAI to Meta are racing to define what the post-iPhone hardware form factor looks like.His successor, John Ternus, is an engineer who has touched every Apple product for 25 years. Whether that's the right profile for what Apple faces is a genuine open question. The board is betting it is.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.

A new Pew survey and a viral Stanford study are being used to suggest social media barely harms teenagers. The numbers in both are smaller than the headlines suggest — and neither has access to the data that would settle the question.That data does exist, however. It's just inside Meta's servers. NYU researchers have now catalogued 35 internal Meta studies from whistleblowers and litigation discovery. What those studies found — 13% of 13-to-15-year-olds reporting weekly unwanted sexual advances, one in three teen girls experiencing worse body image, Mark Zuckerberg noting internally that "3 percent of billions of people is a lot of people" — is different in kind from what external academics can measure.The external science isn't weak because researchers aren't trying. It's limited because the companies won't share the data. And the companies cite that limited external science in their own defense.Members get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, please become a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.