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While Oakland isn’t usually considered part of Silicon Valley, in May it hosted the IT trial of the year – so far.
Last year Elon Musk sued OpenAI, its boss Sam Altman, and other senior staff, for $150 billion over claims that he’d been hoodwinked out of $38 million by the founders of the machine-learning startup.
Musk alleged that he funded the startup because he believed it would be a non-profit, but the organisation then pivoted into a for-profit corporation and shut him out of the business. For its part OpenAI execs claimed Musk was fully aware of the for-profit plans but was angered that he wasn’t going to be running the show.
The claims and counterclaims revealed lots of highly embarrassing details in this billionaire bitchfest. Musk allegedly offered two OpenAI founders free Tesla Model 3 vehicles for their support and threatened OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman just before the trial.
“By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be,” Musk apparently said. Altman’s reputation was also somewhat trashed by former staff who alleged he was a prolific liar who had little technical knowledge and relied on his gift for the gab.
Even Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella was called to the stand, over his company’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI. While circumspect as ever, he did describe the company as “amateur city, as far as I’m concerned,” when an attempt to oust Altman was made.
By May 18 the jury ruled against Musk, but not on evidential grounds. Instead the jury dismissed the case as the statute of limitations had expired on Musk’s charges. Something tells me this isn’t the last we’ve seen of this and there are some juicy tales to tell of this once NDAs expire.
Further down the food chain the worker bees who generate the wealth for these billionaires have been facing a tough 2026. By the end of May technology companies have laid off 115,430 staff, compared to 124,636 people for the whole of last year, according to Layoffs.fyi.
PayPal kicked off May by letting go of 20% of its staff on May 5 and Cloudflare matched that percentage two days later. Upwork, ironically, upped that to 24% of staff on the same day. But it was Meta’s layoffs that got people worried – Zuckerberg’s business dumped 10% of staff, around 8,000 people, almost half of whom were in Silicon Valley.
In a PR cockup (I suggest the latter) Zuckerberg’s 387-foot super yacht named Launchpad docked in Seattle on the same day, not far from Meta’s engineering centre that had also laid off around 1,400 staff that day. The social network’s supreme leader was reportedly not aboard.
As ever, the bulk of excuses for profitable companies laying off staff was that AI is leading to greater efficiencies. This has cut little ice with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who said such arguments don’t “make any sense.”
“The narrative that connects AI to job loss, for many of the CEOs that are doing it – it is just too lazy. AI has just arrived, how is it possible they’re already losing jobs?” he told Channel News Asia.
And finally, if you’re planning on visiting the Valley from overseas, direct flights are going to become very difficult if plans from the Department of Homeland Security go ahead.
In a Fox News interview at the end of the month Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin put forward a plan to ban Customs and Border Protection officers from processing international flights in so-called sanctuary cities – which would include airports in San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles.
Broadly speaking sanctuary cities are those where local police seldom cooperate with immigration service officers and do not inquire about someone’s immigration status if they report a crime – although it varies widely from city to city. Opponents of the policy, including the current administration, say it encourages illegals to enter the country.
Mullin is a big supporter of the plan but others – even within the Trump administration – are less keen, particularly with the FIFA World Cup due to start in a few weeks. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has spoken out against the plan and US airlines are furious.
If you’re planning on visiting the Valley, and the plans are enacted, be prepared for a layover in a flyover state airport and a switch to a domestic carrier.
