Max Harrison-Caldwell, reporting for The San Francisco Standard:

In 2024, the port — which manages the Oakland airport — changed the name from Oakland International Airport to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport, hoping to entice travelers by emphasizing the hub’s proximity to SF. At the time, the number of people flying into Oakland was declining after a brief post-pandemic rebound, and the airport was losing routes.

The effort largely failed, while having the secondary impact of annoying San Francisco leaders, who swiftly sued, arguing that the name would confuse travelers. In 2025, the port swapped the two cities within the name to produce “Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport.”

San Francisco didn’t like that either, but the parties entered mediation in December and have now settled. The new name is fine, as long as “Oakland” always appears before “San Francisco” in all materials and the airport does not add the letters SF to its code, OAK.

The Standard ran this under the cheeky headline “Little-Known Bay Area City Will Keep San Francisco in Its Airport’s Name”, which is a little funny, but I don’t see the need to punch down like this. Nobody calls the city “San Francisco” anyway. Everyone just calls it “San Fran” or “Frisco”, either of which names are acceptable.

Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting on Musk v. Altman from the courtroom in Oakland (gift link):

Today the first witness was sworn in in Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk. I was surprised by how flat he seemed.

This is not the first time I’ve seen Musk in court. During his defamation suit, he turned on the charm and the jury responded by finding him not guilty. Today he looked adrift and unprepared. The only times he showed real animation were when he was bragging about how much he’d done for OpenAI. [...]

What did Musk do at OpenAI? “I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people, taught them everything I know, provided all the initial funding. Besides that, nothing.” He paused for laughter, and one or two people obligingly chuckled. But most of the courtroom was silent. I thought he sounded petulant. “I could have started it as a for-profit and I chose not to,” Musk said.

Elon Musk petty, petulant, smug, awkward, and unprepared? Where’s my fainting couch?

At another point, Musk was asked to explain who former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis was. “Shivon was the, um, my chief of staff and, uh, you know,” Musk said. One person in the gallery — presumably familiar with the fact that Zilis is the mother of a few of Musk’s kids — burst out in loud laughter. But the jury looked puzzled.

In an earlier post today, I pointed out that it’s at least slightly awkward that NYT reporter Mike Isaac is live-tweeting the proceedings on Twitter/X, a platform owned by Musk (and where he famously has rigged the algorithm in his own favor), but, well, when you own an empire as sprawling as Musk’s, pieces of it are bound to collide.

It’s the same with women who are the mothers of Musk’s children.

Matteo Wong, covering Musk v. Altman for The Atlantic (gift link):

Musk is asking that Altman be removed from OpenAI’s board, that the company convert back to a nonprofit, and for the return of allegedly “ill-gotten gains” — some $150 billion — which Musk says would go to OpenAI’s charitable trust. Outside legal experts say that Musk is unlikely to win all or even much of this. His argument is confusing: OpenAI has certainly evolved from a nonprofit lab to a revenue-chasing, consumer behemoth, and a chorus of critics has alleged that it has deviated from its original mission of ensuring that AGI benefits humanity. But Musk himself appears to have insisted that OpenAI couldn’t keep up as a nonprofit — for instance, in early 2018, he wrote an email to OpenAI leadership saying that merging the firm with Tesla “is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google.” And even before he sued, Musk launched a rival for-profit company, xAI. “Mr. Musk’s lawsuit is a pageant of hypocrisy,” William Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI, told the jury today, later adding that Musk had “sour grapes.” [...]

The trial makes the AI boom seem sordid and small. In his sworn deposition, Altman wrote that Musk used to message him complaints that he wanted more credit for the success of OpenAI and took offense at not being included in an anniversary photo. [...] Musk, for his part, has said that he would drop his lawsuit if OpenAI changed its name to “ClosedAI.” Yesterday, as jury selection began, Musk began furiously posting on X and repeatedly called his co-founder “Scam Altman.” Before the start of opening arguments today, Gonzalez Rogers admonished Musk and Altman for their social-media use, asking them to limit their “propensity” to post about the trial; both meekly assented, “Yes.”

It all seems so petty and spiteful, but this is a real federal lawsuit with the entire future of the biggest startup in history at stake.

Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times from the Ronald V. Dellums U.S. Courthouse in Oakland (gift link):

On the first day of testimony in a landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, two notably different tales were offered of how OpenAI evolved from a nonprofit artificial intelligence lab into one of the most influential tech companies in the world.

In Mr. Musk’s telling, OpenAI’s shift was one of the greatest heists in history — a nonprofit ripped from its promise of altruism by the greed of Mr. Altman, who founded OpenAI with Mr. Musk and a group of A.I. researchers more than 10 years ago. In OpenAI’s recounting of those early days, however, it was Mr. Musk who was the voracious capitalist. And when the lab’s other founders refused to go along with his plans, he left in a huff.

“This lawsuit is very simple: It is not OK to steal a charity,” Mr. Musk said Tuesday on the witness stand in an Oakland, Calif., courtroom. If Mr. Altman and OpenAI are allowed to continue with their plans, he added, “It will give license to looting every charity in America.”

A nine-member jury, seated a day earlier in federal court by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, will hear from tech moguls, former OpenAI board members and employees in what is expected to be a monthlong trial. The jurors’ decision could shift the balance of power among A.I. companies, with Mr. Musk seeking $150 billion in damages and an order that OpenAI, now valued at about $730 billion, unwind its for-profit plans.

Gonzales Rogers, you will surely remember, presided over the Epic v. Apple case.

Isaac is live-tweeting the testimony and goings-on on Twitter/X. Here’s his thread of posts yesterday. Isaac is a terrific reporter, and I enjoy following his extemporaneous notes. It’s a little weird though that he’s posting these on Twitter/X, a site that is privately owned by one of the parties in the lawsuit. Musk’s empire is so sprawling that separate pieces inevitably collide.

Jer Crane, in an article earlier this week posted on Twitter/X:

I’m Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS. We build software that rental businesses — primarily car rental operators — use to run their entire operations: reservations, payments, customer management, vehicle tracking, the works. Some of our customers are five-year subscribers who literally cannot operate their businesses without us.

Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider.

It took 9 seconds.

The agent then, when asked to explain itself, produced a written confession enumerating the specific safety rules it had violated.

A day later, Crane posted an update with good news: “Railway CEO just DM’d me with update: They have recovered the data (thank God!).” I sincerely hope that works out.

That said, my sympathy for his plight is minimal. If you play with fire, recklessly even, don’t act outraged when you get burned. You don’t get the benefits of driving a race car at 200 MPH without the associated risks. You don’t get the benefits of running a business with AI coding agents running loose on your production environment without the associated risks. Put that race car on a track, with no access to public roads. Keep that AI coding agent sandboxed away from your production database. Otherwise you get what you deserve. The difference with my fire analogy is that every mammal understands the basic dangers with fire; a lot of people letting AI coding agents run amok have no idea whatsoever what they’re actually doing.

John Scalzi, on Mastodon:

I wouldn’t say that I enjoy these stories but I will say they certainly encourage me NOT to let “AI” anywhere anything I consider to be sensitive and/or valuable.

Same thing goes for cryptocurrency crime victims.