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Meet the lawyer who beat Elon Musk — twice
Brief published July 1, 2026 · Original source published June 30, 2026
Original reporting by Elizabeth Lopatto at theverge.com.
Automated brief. Verify important details at the original source.
The Man Who Told Elon Musk "No" In Court, Twice, And Lived To Play Guitar About It
A lawyer named Bill Savitt has now defeated Elon Musk in court not once but twice, which puts him in a category of people so small it probably fits in a phone booth with room left over for their egos. The rest of us are stress-eating and doomscrolling while this man apparently unwinds by playing Fender Telecaster. The audacity.
The story here is genuinely remarkable, and not just because watching someone methodically dismantle Elon Musk's legal arguments carries a certain primal satisfaction that transcends political affiliation. Bill Savitt, a senior partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, is the lawyer who faced down Musk in the Delaware Tesla compensation case (where Musk's $56 billion pay package got voided like a bad coupon) and then showed up again as the attorney for Sam Altman and OpenAI when Musk decided to sue them instead of, as The Verge's Elizabeth Lopatto so precisely put it, seeing a therapist about his AI failures. Two cases. Two losses for the richest man on earth. One very calm attorney with excellent taste in guitars.
The OpenAI lawsuit, formally titled Musk v. Altman, is the kind of case that could only exist in the specific cultural moment we're living through: a billionaire suing his former nonprofit co-founder for allegedly betraying a mission to save humanity, while simultaneously running a competing AI company, while also buying the platform where most of the AI discourse happens, while also advising the federal government. The legal theory, stripped of its philosophical packaging, was essentially that OpenAI had promised to be a charity forever and then pivoted to being a very profitable company, which Musk found unconscionable, possibly because he wasn't involved in the profitable part. Courts have seen stranger arguments, but not many.
Savitt, by all accounts, approaches courtroom combat the way a very experienced surgeon approaches a tricky procedure: with an almost unsettling calm, thorough preparation, and zero interest in performing for the audience. This is in direct contrast to Musk, who sat in the courtroom and reportedly fumed at Savitt during proceedings in a manner that witnesses compared to a toddler encountering a firm boundary for the first time. The image is difficult to shake. The world's most powerful private citizen, owner of rockets and satellites and social media platforms and now significant portions of the federal bureaucracy, glaring at a 59-year-old attorney in a suit who simply continued making his legal arguments without breaking stride. Savitt has reportedly described his approach to high-stakes litigation as methodical and fact-driven, which, in the context of opposing counsel who tweets in real time, is basically a superpower.
The Delaware compensation case, the first Savitt-Musk encounter, deserves its own paragraph because it set the template. Musk had been awarded a compensation package by Tesla's board that was, depending on your perspective, either a visionary incentive structure for transforming the electric vehicle industry or an absolute fantasy number that a friendly board rubber-stamped while Musk was already the CEO and clearly not going anywhere. The judge, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, voided it in January 2024. Musk responded by posting polls on X asking if Tesla should reincorporate in Texas, then moved Tesla's incorporation to Texas, then won a shareholder vote to approve the package again under the new jurisdiction, a sequence of events that suggests either that the system worked or that it absolutely did not, depending on which paragraph of the story you stopped reading. Through all of it, Savitt remained the calm, methodical legal presence on the other side of the table. He is, in the vocabulary of people who have spent time around high-conflict litigation, what you might call unrattleable.
The Fender Telecaster detail matters more than it seems. A Telecaster is not a showboat guitar. It is not a Les Paul with its baroque curves and heavy sustain, and it is not a Stratocaster with its movie-star contours. A Telecaster is a plank of ash or alder with two pickups and a bolt-on neck, and it sounds like someone decided simplicity was the whole point. Country players use it. Indie rock players use it. Tom Yorke uses one. It rewards people who can play rather than people who want to look like they can play. Whether Savitt chose it consciously as a philosophical statement or just because he likes how it sounds is unknown. But it is extremely on-brand for a man whose professional reputation rests entirely on competence rather than spectacle.
The reality check is this: Musk v. Altman was dismissed earlier this year, with Musk's team declining to pursue it further after the initial causes of action were stripped away by the court. OpenAI is still converting to a for-profit structure. Sam Altman is still running OpenAI. Musk's competing AI company, xAI, is still competing. The lawsuit accomplished very little legally, but it cost everyone involved significant time, money, and attention, and it put a lot of internal OpenAI documents into the public record, which is either a feature or a bug depending on your relationship to transparency. For developers building on OpenAI's APIs and founders making platform bets on these models, the practical takeaway is that the legal and organizational structure of the companies they depend on remains genuinely unsettled, contested, and subject to the personal grievances of very wealthy people.
For everyone else, the lesson Musk v. Altman offers is smaller and stranger. The most scrutinized AI governance dispute in recent history, a case nominally about the future of artificial general intelligence and humanity's relationship to it, ended not with a landmark ruling but with a voluntary dismissal, a guitarist from a white-shoe law firm, and the quiet realization that having the most followers on your own platform does not translate to having the best lawyers.
Somewhere, a Telecaster is being tuned. It sounds like winning.