Tech

Even though Valve says the Steam Controller is built for “anything running Steam,” out of curiosity, I paired my Steam Controller review unit to my iPhone 16 Pro this afternoon. Most native iOS games I tried didn’t recognize the controller. When they did, there were problems, like not being able to move my Fortnite character at all.

Among the evidence released publicly, there’s this email exchange (Exhibit No.844) between Valve founder Gabe Newell and Elon Musk about, of all things, trying to get a SpaceX tour and OpenAI introduction for Hideo Kojima.

During Roblox’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday, CEO David Baszucki commented on the photorealistic upsampling tech he’d shared a demo of earlier this week:

Apple CEO Tim Cook said during an earnings call that the company expects “significantly higher memory costs” in the upcoming quarter. He added that Apple will “look at a range of options” to address the global shortage.

Cook:

After Birchall said he had no first-hand knowledge of the xAI bid for OpenAI’s assets, OpenAI’s lawyer asked that his testimony from the direct examination be struck. We are going to hear about that now, outside the presence of the jury.

Making Reddit faster “remains a meaningful opportunity and can lead to an outsized impact,” says CEO Steve Huffman in the company’s Q1 2026 letter to shareholders released with its earnings.

He sees the OpenAI for-profit term sheet and writes to Shivon Zilis: “Pretty plain vanilla for-profit structure. So kinda hard to push a narrative that doesn’t involve investors being very focused on ROI. I’m a super fan of capitalism and making tons of money doing great things but not sure if this correlates with the ‘noble cause for humanity, not doing it to make money’ narrative. Did he/would he [Altman, lower on the email chain] offer E a board seat?”

We saw Chris Clark’s email about pausing donations yesterday during Musk’s testimony. Today, we see an email from Birchall: “This was ready to go out when I was told that Elon informed Greg and Ilya that the funding would be on pause until they came to terms on the right path moving forward.”
This was while there were discussions of how to put the for-profit Musk wanted together.

In a unanimous vote, the Senate passed a rule on Thursday that bars senators and their staff from trading on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, effective immediately, as CNBC reports. The ban follows growing concerns about insider trading — earlier this month, Kalshi banned three political candidates for bets related to their races.

And we are talking with Birchall about tax deductions for charitable giving.

OpenAI and Musk’s counsel need to discuss something... Back in 15.

He was used, I think, to get financial documents into the record. We are now on the cross, and he is giving mercifully brief and direct answers.

There is a confirmation document from Chris Clark to Elon Musk showing the donation values. The donation was to OpenAI, as agreed in the stipulated facts, and in conflict to what Musk testified today.

We’re looking at a summary of about 60 donations to OpenAI, which Birchall says were directed by Musk, with Birchall helping execute all of them.

I guess she isn’t into Birchall’s testimony about Musk’s charitable contributions?

Jared Birchall’s testimony will begin. Birchall runs Musk’s family office, Excession LLC, and generally serves as his fixer.

Savitt asked about Musk’s $1 billion funding commitment. When did Musk stop funding OpenAI? 2020. And that was when they broke the deal? No, I was uncomfortable. (some crosstalk)
Musk: “I understand leading questions. That’s a leading answer.”
YGR: He can lead. He can lead all he wants. Let’s remind everyone you are not a lawyer and you’ve never taken a class in evidence.
Musk: “I did take law 101 technically, but yes I am not a lawyer.”

Musk’s back from break, reiterating that he had reason for waiting as long as he did to file suit against OpenAI — and saying his initial understanding of OpenAI’s agreement with Microsoft was that it didn’t violate the mission of the charity. “I don’t think I had a basis for filing a lawsuit before I did,” Musk says. He also refers to xAI as the smallest of the AI players, coming after Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Chinese AI models.

Resuming the redirect of Musk by Molo

In the document of stipulated facts — that is, what everyone has agreed on — it’s said that Musk gave Teslas to OpenAI as an in-kind contribution. In response to questioning from YGR, Musk says that he gave the Teslas to individuals, personally, and not to OpenAI: “I bought at full price and gave them to individuals. It was a reward to the individuals.”
I don’t know if this matters, but it sure is interesting.

Apparently he wasn’t 100 percent confident in yesterday’s clarification, because Molo asks Musk to clarify whether the “AI enabled robot army” mentioned in cross-examination is a military army. “No, we do not make any weapons,” Musk says. The point of his using the term was that “if we made a lot of robots we need to make sure they’re safe and don’t turn into a Terminator situation … you see int he movie, it’s not a good situation.”

Claude Security uses the Opus 4.7 model to scan a business’s codebase for vulnerabilities and issue a fix. This tool is rolling out to enterprise customers globally and isn’t to be confused with Anthropic’s Mythos, a powerful AI model that can identify and exploit vulnerabilities across operating systems and web browsers.

Under questioning from Molo, his own lawyer, Musk tries to establish that he wasn’t causing harm to OpenAI. He says that as far as he knows, OpenAI wasn’t unable to cover any critical expenses because he ended his donations. He didn’t ask Andrej Karpathy to leave and join Tesla, only hired him after he said he was leaving OpenAI. Neuralink (while it was authorized to do so apparently) didn’t poach anyone from OpenAI as far as he knows. Did he seriously recruit anyone from OpenAI for Tesla besides Karpathy? “I don’t think so.” He reiterates that Tesla isn’t currently working on AGI, despite a recent tweet indicating it would achieve it.

On the cross exams by OpenAI and Microsoft, there was minimal (though still some) bickering, and we are now getting many more yeses and nos as full answers. I’m not sure whether Musk was trying to run out the clock yesterday or what, but he’s clearly rethought his strategy.

Outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook and current Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are considering bids for the Seattle Seahawks, Front Office Sports reports.

In the final section of cross-examination, Musk is asked about speaking with Altman in 2020. Musk apparently told Altman that OpenAI looked “hypocritical” after the deal with Microsoft and suggested he change the name of OpenAI. “He reassured me they were staying on mission,” Musk says on the stand — and therefore, Musk didn’t sue. Following that, cross-examination wraps up.

Savitt mentions an X post where Musk says “the future is going to be amazing with AI and robots enabling sustainable abundance for all” and asks if he thinks it’s accurate. “Well, I’ve also said there are many possible futures. Some futures are good, and some are not good,” Musk says. “I think it’s generally better to err on the side of optimism than pessimism.” Musk agrees that “aspirationally,” he promotes xAI with the message that the future is going to be amazing.