Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek said in a statement that the “facts and the timeline in this case have long been clear” and the tech giant remains “committed to our work with OpenAI to advance and scale AI.”

In posts on X, Musk called Gonzalez Rogers an “activist” judge “who simply used the jury as a fig leaf” and ruled on a “calendar technicality.” While the judge’s ruling doesn’t create a formal legal precedent, Musk claimed that, “She just handed out a free license to loot charities if you can keep the looting quiet for a few years!” He added in a separate post, “There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity.”

Despite the disappointing result for Musk, the trial appears to have tarnished the public image of OpenAI and its top executives. New details emerged about Brockman’s wealth and Altman’s alleged history of dishonesty. Both were also pulled away from their day-to-day work for tens, if not hundreds, of hours to conduct depositions, prepare to testify, sit on the witness stand, and show face in court.

Musk spent much less time in the courtroom than the OpenAI executives, about three days before never returning again. He even flew to China for President Donald Trump’s state visit last week, though he technically could have been called to testify again on short notice. “I will say that it was a surprise to us to see that,” Savitt told the media last week. “Instead of being in the jurisdiction where he filed the lawsuit, ready to come in front of the jurors who he has caused to be impaneled, [he] decided to get on Air Force One and go to China.”

Though the case carried financial and emotional stakes, it was also a competition of bravado between two tech billionaires who broke up a brief partnership of convenience over an alleged leadership dispute, only to end up pursuing remarkably similar visions about the future of generative AI. Musk’s bid to settle the lawsuit just before the trial started was rebuffed.

12-Day Trial

Over the 12 days of the trial, attorneys for OpenAI repeatedly pointed to what they said was a lack of evidence corroborating Musk’s version of events.

Musk, the famously temperamental serial entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, and Altman, then a 30-year-old startup founder turned investor, cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit because they believed it would help them claim the “moral high ground” over their biggest competitor, Google. As a nonprofit, OpenAI could focus on keeping AI from destroying humanity without having to concentrate on maximizing value for shareholders. Musk and Altman believed that mission-driven approach would help the organization attract top researchers and win public support.

But time would show that they misjudged the fundraising challenges that the nonprofit structure would pose, as well as the amount of money they would need to develop so-called artificial general intelligence.

In his lawsuit, Musk alleged that the $38 million he donated to OpenAI from 2016 through 2020 had been misused because Altman and Brockman spent it on groundbreaking AI research and then shifted all that technical expertise to a for-profit subsidiary. But Musk had agreed to the for-profit’s creation, according to evidence and testimony presented in court. He decided not to invest in it after losing his bid to control it.

Musk became especially angry when Microsoft later invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI and the startup became a household name after the stunning debut of ChatGPT in 2022.

The following year Musk started a rival to OpenAI called xAI, and began laying the groundwork for the federal lawsuit he would file in 2024. He said at trial that his concerns about OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary’s swing only emerged in 2023, but evidence presented in the case suggested his doubts went back further, indicating that he had a chance to file his case sooner and didn't.

Several members of the jury, which included a nurse assistant, a retiree, and a city government worker, expressed unfavorable views of Musk before they were selected. They took copious notes in binders during the trial and suggested several questions for witnesses that Gonzalez Rogers directed attorneys to incorporate into their examinations.

Had Musk won, he could have been entitled to financial damages, up to potentially over $100 billion from OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary, which he said he would have donated back to OpenAI’s nonprofit. Musk also wanted Altman and Brockman to lose their jobs, with the court providing ongoing oversight to hold OpenAI accountable to its charitable mission of safely developing AGI.

OpenAI is nowhere near turning a profit—it has continued spending heavily to improve and operate its AI models. But annualized revenue from subscriptions, licensing, and ads surpassed $20 billion in 2025, according to the company. It is currently seeking to list shares on a public stock exchange as soon as this year, cementing the pivot away from its nonprofit roots. OpenAI maintains a nonprofit foundation that has some oversight over AI research and is likely more financially endowed than any other charity in the world, but critics view it as an extension of the company and no longer the other way around.

But it’s not just novelty. An Institute for Strategic Dialogue analysis of Iranian diplomatic accounts found that in just 50 days, they garnered nearly a billion views, 14 times that of the prewar period. AI-generated content dominated the top of the charts: An AI video of Jesus slapping Trump into a pit of fire hit 24.1 million views; an AI-generated Trump singing a spoof ballad called “Blockade, Blockade” cleared 8.8 million. The Lego series accumulated millions more across reposts and platforms, with the New Yorker profiling the team behind it.

None of this is resonating because the public has become Khamenei partisans. It’s landing because Iran isn’t manufacturing anti-American sentiment—it’s giving it a format, aimed at a historically, globally unpopular administration. The suspicions about U.S. power and moral rot were already there. As social media scholar Renée DiResta said, it “doesn’t have to change your mind. It just has to win the war for the attention of your target audience.”

Lego videos are just the highest-production example of a broader phenomenon. Across pro-Iran channels and sympathetic creators from Bengaluru to Brooklyn, AI-generated content follows the same logic. None of it pretends to be real. The AI is the aesthetic—and it may be bridging a cultural gap that has traditionally hobbled foreign propaganda. These models are trained predominantly on Western, English-language internet culture, which means an Iranian operator prompting in Farsi gets output that’s already fluent in American meme grammar, slotting seamlessly into AI slop genres millions already scroll through without friction: Fruit Love Island, AI Jesus, Italian brain rot. Propaganda is turned invisible—not because it’s disguised, but because the entire feed it lives in is already synthetic.

Our field is not built for this. We fact-check lies—but this content doesn’t make claims. We find fake accounts—but this spreads through real people. We slap labels on AI content pretending to be authentic—but this isn’t pretending to be anything. Nobody fact-checks a meme. Nobody reverse-image-searches a cartoon. And taking action backfires: What’s the terms-of-service violation? It’s not deceptive. It’s not inciting violence. It’s a Lego cartoon. Take it down and watch Iran’s embassy accounts generate millions of views mocking the United States for feeling threatened by toys. The content is engineered so that any response, including suppression, generates more content. The result is incredibly effective propaganda that our entire toolkit was designed to miss—because it was never asking to be believed. It was asking to be felt.

But AI content is only one front. Shitposting—the art of posting deliberately provocative, absurdist content, usually memes, to drive engagement—has become a legitimate tool of Iranian statecraft. In late March, Trump told reporters the Strait of Hormuz would be “jointly controlled … me and the ayatollah, whoever the next ayatollah is.” Within hours, Iran’s embassy in South Africa posted a photo of a car dashboard with a toy pink-and-blue steering wheel attached next to the real one. Caption: “The Strait of Hormuz will be controlled by me and the Ayatollah 😎😁.” An official diplomatic account of a sovereign nation responded to a U.S. presidential statement with a shitpost. That’s not a social media team going rogue—social media rewards absurdity, confrontation, speed, and irony, and Iran’s diplomats have restructured their entire communication style around that fact.

Iran isn’t the first to try this. Russian embassies flirted with this in the 2010s, as when the Russian Embassy in London posted a Pepe the Frog meme mocking Britain. Chinese wolf warriors—combative diplomats whose provocation ranged from co-opting George Floyd’s last words as a geopolitical clapback to accusing Australia of war crimes—pushed further, generating outrage but little actual persuasion.

Iran’s embassies are making those wolf warriors look like puppies—this isn’t just diplomats trolling, it’s trolling as diplomacy. It helps that there’s a war on—peacetime trolling never had these emotional stakes. It helps that whoever is running these accounts appears to have creative latitude that China’s rigidly centralized messaging apparatus never allowed.

And it helps that the content is actually funny. China ultimately demoted its most prominent wolf warriors after generating backlash without persuasion. Iran faces no such reckoning—the audience is laughing with it, not at it. The White House deploys its own combative social media, of course, but it’s aimed inward. It’s fighting a domestic culture war for an audience that already agrees with it and rarely considers foreign policy. Iran is aimed outward, at a global audience that’s already paying attention because their countries are in the blast radius.

They also benefit from their relative position: When the Russian foreign ministry trolls, it’s a great power flexing—and generally losing the resulting contest to a scrappy Ukrainian response. When Iran’s embassy in Zimbabwe tells Trump “we’ve lost the keys”—mocking Trump’s demand to open the Strait of Hormuz —it’s the class clown shooting a spitball at the principal: The asymmetry is part of the joke.

And the joke is engineered to travel. Each post is designed to break apart, then spread—even the Lego videos’ creators encourage clipping. Screenshots get pulled from context. Posts get stitched together. Formats get hijacked: Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari’s mocking signoff, “Thank you for your attention to this matter”—a phrase Trump often uses in his posts on Truth Social—has become a recurring bit across pro-Iran accounts. The image is the meme. The caption is the meme. The reply is the meme. These artifacts fragment on contact with the network and keep traveling without their authors.

And that’s the trap: The best amplifiers are real accounts run by real people sharing things they find genuinely funny, as these memes often are. Whether or not there’s inauthentic coordination is incidental—there are many more people who think U.S. foreign policy is ridiculous; Iranian shitposts speak to that in a familiar format. Our detection apparatus was built to catch fake people doing fake things. Iran is winning by getting real people to do real things, for free.

None of this is about winning a news cycle. It’s about slowly shifting what feels like common sense—who’s worth admiring, who’s worth laughing at—one share at a time. That’s not a war disinformation experts can fight, and frankly, it’s not our job to. Iran out-messaging the United States is a U.S. government problem.

But understanding what’s happening is our job—and right now, we don’t. Much of our industry’s tools were built to expose covert operations, and they’re good at that. But the threat has migrated to overt, memeable propaganda that doesn’t hide its origins, doesn’t make false claims, and doesn’t need fake accounts. We don’t even have the instruments to measure it. We need new tools, new frameworks, and new thinking. But first, we need to admit that you can’t fact-check a vibe—and stop trying.

Almost daily, Ukraine’s new weaponry capabilities, in particular its own long-range missiles and high-precision drones, are wreaking havoc where they hit energy infrastructure, arms and explosives factories, and military command and logistics centers. On the home front, Ukraine is playing defense, killing or wounding about 35,000 Russians a month, according to Ukrainian sources, bringing some estimates of the war’s total death toll to 352,000 Russian service members.

According to Ulf Brunnbauer, a historian at the University of Regensburg, Ukraine’s object is to show its Western supporters that “they have not only staying power but can really harm Russia, thus helping their case for continuous support. This puts Kyiv in a better position for eventual peace talks by increasing the incentives for Russia to settle for a compromise.”

The battered oil refineries smoldering across Russia underscore Ukraine’s success in choking Russia’s economic lifeline. In April and thus this month, the Ukrainian armed forces have hit 20 oil refineries and export terminals. The dramatic images of Ukrainian drone strikes on the Tuapse oil refinery on Russia’s Black Sea coast on April 28 displayed a Russia at war and reeling: For weeks, thick black smoke spewed out of the site and blanketed more than 300 kilometers of southern Russia, including three cities.

The strikes, some hitting as far as 1,750 km from Ukraine—that’s 2.5 times farther than the range possible four years ago—have rendered Russia unable to fully capitalize on the high petroleum prices caused by the Iran war.

According to Al Jazeera, Ukraine has deterred Russia from reaping the gigantic windfall profits that it was counting on from oil exports, some of which the United States made possible by lifting individual sanctions in the context of the Iran war and energy crisis. Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign against Russian port and energy infrastructure in “a calculated bid to prevent Russia from offloading oil onto tankers,” Al Jazeera reports. In other words: Ukraine found a way to check the effects of a U.S. policy that had originally looked devastating for Ukraine. In March, Russia’s seaborne oil shipments dropped by roughly 300,000 barrels per day, partly as a result of Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries. According to Bloomberg, average output at Russian oil refineries fell to 4.69 million barrels per day in April, a record low since December 2009.

And the strikes on military installations such as air defense systems, airfields, and armament plants appear to be thrwarting Russia’s ground war in Ukraine, too—Kyiv’s most immediate priority. Russia’s forward momentum on the battlefield in Ukraine has ground to a virtual halt. Its armed forces even suffered a net loss of territory in April, for the first time since August 2024, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based think tank. Russia’s anticipated spring offensive is thus far a washout.

Just this weekend, Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities reached deep into the Russian heartland, hammering its military tech industry in locations previously considered untouchable due to their closeness to the capital. Long-range attack drones struck Angstrem Microelectronics in Zelenograd, a main cog in Russia’s semiconductor industry. And drones also damaged MKB Raduga, the nerve center for Russia’s cruise missile program, in Dubna, just 80 miles north of Moscow.

“This strategy is all about the battlefield in Ukraine. It’s about stopping Russia from taking the Donbas and forcing it into negotiations that Ukraine can control,” said ISW analyst George Barros. “That should be the basis for a settlement.”

Until now, Barros argued, Russian President Vladimir Putin has operated “as if it doesn’t matter how high costs run as long as Russia keeps making gains and the West’s will dwindles. The idea was that Russia will simply outlast them and win in long run.” But Russia is obviously now wavering in a way that it hasn’t before, Barros said.

There are signs everywhere that Russia is panicking but perhaps none greater than Putin’s call for a cease-fire on May 9, Russia’s Victory Day national holiday, when it commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, usually with plenty of pomp and bluster. Putin pleaded with Ukraine not to disrupt the celebrations, and the usually uber-martial parade burnished no military hardware at all this year—a stinging admission that Ukraine has the capability of striking a top-tier public event in the middle of Moscow in the middle of the day.

According to the Moscow Times, an independent Russian media outlet, the Kremlin is rethinking its war goals and the narrative that it tells Russians about the “special military operation,” as it calls the war, downplaying its significance. Russian officials are apparently preparing to frame a peace deal with Ukraine as a “victory.” The Kremlin wants to shift public messaging away from its previous goal of capturing all of Ukraine, and in particular Kyiv, and toward holding what Russia already has—occupied territories in eastern and southern Ukraine—firmly in its hand.

And there’s even evidence of discontent among Russian political strategists regarding the war’s high cost. High-ranking officials have begun to question aloud the war’s continuation, according to the Moscow Times. Reportedly, they believe that taking the entire Donbas requires a full-fledged wartime economy and countrywide mass mobilization. This, they warned, would dangerously exhaust Russia’s resources, break the economy, and accelerate already dire population decline.

These setbacks for Russia are increasingly reflected in public opinion, which has largely supported the war until now. Although Russian polling shows that 73 percent of Russians approve of Putin’s performance—a robust number, were this applied to Western politicos—it is the lowest figure recorded since February 2022, according to the Public Opinion Foundation.

Most Russia experts doubt that Ukraine pins any hope on Russians rising up to overthrow Putin. The authoritarian state’s controls are too muscular, and just to make sure that this occurs to no one, Putin has clamped down on social media, such as the widely used Telegram channels, which are a widely accessed media source for many Russians.

“Public opinion,” said Barros of ISW, “is important to the Kremlin today in a way it wasn’t during the Cold War. Our team has been astonished about the extent to which Putin has made militarily questionable decisions in order to maximize regime stability and minimize discontent at home.”

And the deep-strike capabilities aren’t the “only cards that Ukraine has now,” said Fedir Serdiuk, a Ukrainian Defense Ministry advisor, in reference to U.S. President Donald Trump’s contention that Ukraine “doesn’t have the cards” to win the war.

“Ukraine relies on state-of-the-art unmanned surface vehicles and sensors to navigate and control the Black Sea,” Serdiuk said. “Millions of first-person-view drones, surveillance platforms, and much improved intelligence tech has helped sustain defense on the ground.” Serdiuk also pointed to ever more effective special operations such as Operation Spiderweb, a covert drone attack deep inside Russia in June 2025 that took out a significant portion of Russia’s strategic aviation capabilities, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers.