Did you know you can't steal a charity? Don't worry. Elon Musk will remind you.

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2026

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the witness stand this week in his lawsuit against OpenAI, and it's already getting messy. Emails, texts, and his own tweets are surfacing in court, and there are plenty more witnesses to come. Musk's argument against OpenAI? By converting the company to a for-profit model, Sam Altman betrayed the “nonprofit for the benefit of humanity” mission Musk signed up to fund. As Musk keeps reminding the courtroom: “You can't steal a charity.” On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec and Sean O'Kane break down what's actually at stake in the courtroom and what to watch for as Altman and others take the stand, plus deals, defense tech, and what Big Tech's earnings week revealed about the limits of the AI spending era. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Why cloud was the winner of earnings week, and what AWS, Google, and Microsoft's numbers say about where enterprise AI spending is actually landing The scholarship app founder taking Sallie Mae to court after they acquired his startup…and began selling its student data to ad networks and universities BMW i Ventures new $300 million fund with its sights set on AI How defense tech startup Scout AI is pitching “military AGI” using vision-language-action (VLA) models Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's podcast about the business of startups.
0:05.7	Today is Friday, May 1st.
0:08.1	And I'm Kirsten Koresak, transportation editor here at TechCrunch.
0:11.4	And today is just senior reporter, Sean O'Kane.
0:14.3	Anthony isn't here today.
0:16.0	We will miss him.
0:17.2	Normally we kick off the show, usually on the lighter side of tech, you know, sometimes a fun
0:22.4	story. This is a little bit different. Sean, catch us up on this investigation that you and
0:30.9	Dominic Madori Davis did on a startup. I think it has a valuable lesson for founders who maybe are celebrating or about
0:39.3	to celebrate their startup getting acquired.
0:41.9	That's really the thrust of this.
0:43.2	We wrote this week about this company called Scali that was founded by this guy called,
0:47.4	named Christopher Gray, back in 2013, a really, like, early iPhone and like smartphone revolution kind of company where he, you know,
0:57.8	as someone who came from like a relatively poor background and didn't have a lot of access to
1:02.1	college, realized that there was an opportunity to build something, you know, in particular
1:07.2	at the time, an app to better match, not only find, but match students with
1:13.2	scholarships that they were well qualified for. And, you know, it really caught on. It was like one of
1:19.5	those like really popular 99 cent apps in some of the earlier days in the app stores. And that led
1:24.2	them to Shark Tank. And he was on Shark Tank in 2015, got some money
1:27.5	from some of the sharks in our reporting. I went back and found an Instagram reel from one of the
1:32.2	hosts of the show who sort of referred to it as like one of the all caps worst fights that they
1:38.4	ever had of who got to invest in the company, which I thought was pretty funny. And then, you know, it sort of cruised
	...

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