Over the next month, a who’s who of the tech industry is expected to appear at the Ronald V. Dellums courthouse in Oakland, California, for the legal clash between Elon Musk and artificial intelligence company OpenAI.
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, is expected to spend quality time on the witness stand, as is Sam Altman, the billionaire CEO of OpenAI.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is expected to resign. Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and the mother of at least four of Mr. Musk’s children, is on the witness list. So did Tasha McCauley, another former OpenAI board member who tried to fire Mr. Altman.
That Oakland plays host to this tech industry pantheon is one of the many oddities in this high-stakes process. While plenty of tech workers live in Oakland, only a handful of tech companies are based in “The Town,” as the locals call it. The go-go tech culture of San Francisco and Silicon Valley is notably absent from this city, even though it’s only about 12 miles from OpenAI’s headquarters.
“Oakland is an interesting city for this to happen because we’re kind of considered a second city,” said Lesley Mandros Bell, an artist and teacher who has lived in Oakland for nearly four decades.
Mr. Musk says that Mr. Altman and other OpenAI executives tricked him into giving money to launch OpenAI as a nonprofit lab that was supposed to be dedicated to producing artificial intelligence that was safe for humanity.
Today, OpenAI is a profitable company and one of the most influential technology companies in the world, very likely on its way to one of the largest public offerings in history. Mr Musk left OpenAI after a power struggle with Mr Altman. (He now has his own AI company.) His lawsuit is seeking $150 billion and an order to return OpenAI to its nonprofit status.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of copyright infringement for news content related to AI systems. Both companies denied the claims.)
Oakland’s federal courthouse is part of a towering postmodern complex built in 1993 and named for Ronald Dellums, a longtime congressman whose district included Oakland and who served as the city’s mayor from 2007 to 2011. But Mr. Dellums, who died in 2018, might have frowned upon the building’s exposure to ruthless capital. He was a democratic socialist whose politics landed him on President Richard M. Nixon’s “enemies list.”
“We start with a humanistic value system and ask: What prevents life and growth?” said Mr. Dellums in the interview in 1976. “The answer is war, pollution, elitism, corporate corruption, corporate power that controls over 90 percent of the wealth and controls people’s lives.”
The courthouse is located next to a quiet city center that has been struggling since the pandemic. In the first quarter of this year, nearly 40 percent of downtown Oakland office space was vacant, according to real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. That vacancy rate is stubbornly high, even though downtown San Francisco has fallen to about 30 percent over the past year.
For example, downtown across the street from the federal courthouse has more than a dozen empty storefronts. On a recent Monday, the shopping and office plaza had few — and sometimes no — pedestrians, except for a janitor sweeping up some stray trash.
Oakland, a historically blue-collar city known for manufacturing and commerce with one of the best food scenes in the country, has a median income that is two-thirds that of San Francisco, as well as a median home value. The city’s economy, whose population is slightly more than half that of San Francisco, is built more on health care and government than technology companies. Oakland’s tallest building, at 404 feet, is the headquarters of healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente; the tallest in San Francisco, at 1,070 feet, is home to the software company Salesforce.
“We’ve always been part of the Bay Area, but neighbors,” said Ashleigh Kanat, the city’s director of economic and workforce development. “We’ve always had a more diverse economic base.”
In recent years, Oakland has built a reputation as a city of luck. It lost three professional sports teams in quick succession – the Warriors, Raiders and Athletics. After the pandemic, it struggled with crime and homelessness along with a bad budget deficit. In 2024, voters recalled Mayor Sheng Thao, who was later accused of corruption.
Some of these woes have eased. Last year, violent crime was down 25 percent from the year before, while vehicle theft was down 40 percent.
Parts of downtown Oakland are showing improvement, such as the weekly farmers market, which teems with grandmothers haggling over vegetables and residents chatting with longtime vendors at fruit stands. But these areas of foot traffic are surrounded by buildings and offices for sale or rent.
“The market is recovering faster in San Francisco than in Oakland,” said Robert Sammons, senior director of research at Cushman & Wakefield. But, he added, “the way it goes in San Francisco, usually a few years later Oakland goes.”
The fact that the trial is being held in Oakland at all was a bit of a luck of the draw. In the Northern District of California, cases are randomly assigned to judges who sit in courthouses in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose.
The Oakland courthouse has seen tech company trials before. The judge hearing the case, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, presided over Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple. As the trial of Mr. Musk and OpenAI begins, other judges in the courthouse are scheduled to hear cases involving Uber and Salesforce.
Still, locals said they were unimpressed by the tech celebrities.
“We have to think about bigger issues,” said Diana Hernandez, who has lived in Oakland for more than a decade and co-owns Chef Sarah Germany, which makes sauces and pickles with local produce. “I’m more worried about the people on my block.
And, of course, concerns about crowded streets and sidewalks. “I’m not looking forward to the spectacle,” said Victor Harris, who was born and raised in Oakland and owns Reuschelle’s Cheesecakes, a local cheesecake business. “I can see it diverting traffic.
Selecting nine people for the panel from Oakland and the area stretching from the wine region to the north and parts of Silicon Valley to the south can be a challenge. In 2023, during Mr. Musk’s trial in San Francisco, the multi-billionaire’s lawyer questioned potential jurors about their ability to remain neutral, so much so that the judge warned him that his remarks “crossed the line.”
“The biggest problem is the fact that you have people who have been in the news a lot,” said Jeremy Fogel, who was a judge in the Northern District of California from 1998 to 2018. “Musk in particular is kind of a controversial person, so people are going to have opinions about him.”
Example: A protest targeting Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman is planned for the first day of the trial outside the federal courthouse.
Topic: “Everybody’s here to fart.”
