Sam Altman took the stand this week in the ongoing legal battle between OpenAI and Elon Musk, testifying that Musk tried to "kill" the AI company he helped co-found. Musk's side, predictably, frames it differently — he says he was shut out of an organization he bankrolled to the tune of tens of millions, only to watch it pivot from a nonprofit mission to a profit-hungry juggernaut partnered with Microsoft.

Here's the thing: they're probably both right, and that's what makes this so exhausting.

Musk helped launch OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, ostensibly to keep powerful AI technology open and accountable. Then he left the board. Then OpenAI created a capped-profit subsidiary. Then ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer product in history. Then Musk suddenly remembered he had concerns about the mission. The timeline is... convenient.

But Altman isn't exactly a sympathetic protagonist either. OpenAI's governance has been a revolving door of chaos — remember when the board fired Altman and then un-fired him in the span of a long weekend? The organization's nonprofit-to-profit pipeline is exactly the kind of institutional bait-and-switch that should make anyone who cares about transparency uncomfortable.

As one Bay Area resident perfectly put it: "I favor trial by combat in this case. Like in Game of Thrones, except with these two there'd probably be a lot more slapping involved."

Another local was even more succinct: "It's hard not to root for a meteor to hit that courthouse."

The mood is understandable. This isn't a battle over the soul of artificial intelligence. It's two billionaires arguing over who gets to control — and profit from — what might be the most consequential technology of our lifetime. Neither one is fighting for you.

The real question San Franciscans should be asking isn't who wins this lawsuit. It's why the future of AI governance is being decided by ego and litigation rather than, say, actual democratic accountability. But sure, let's watch two tech titans spend millions on lawyers while the rest of us hope the machines they're building don't eventually make the whole argument moot.