Elon Musk's lead counsel Steven Molo apologized to a federal jury Thursday for his client's absence from the closing arguments in Musk's own $150 billion suit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. Musk was in Beijing, accompanying President Trump on the Xi summit. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had previously placed Musk on what she described as recall status. [1] [2]

The paper's Friday piece argued that Musk versus Altman is not a verdict story yet because the jury is advisory and Judge Gonzalez Rogers writes the ruling that matters. Saturday's correction is narrower and stranger: it is not a verdict story yet, and the plaintiff was not in the room for the closing arguments anyway. The May 15 hidden-counterparty piece named OpenAI as the implicit center of four adjacent stories. The Beijing trip puts Musk on the same implicit map, on the opposite side of the Pacific.

CNBC reported Molo's on-record apology and the procedural awkwardness of a plaintiff who flies to Beijing during his own closing-argument week. [1] CBS News reported that Musk arrived in Beijing on Wednesday while the $150 billion suit was being argued in Oakland and that the judge had told Musk last month he might be recalled to a California courtroom. [2] CBS's video desk carried the closing-argument tape. [3]

MSM coverage treated this as character color — the latest entry in the long Musk genre of priorities and process. That is one reading. The institutional reading is sharper. The plaintiff in a domestic AI-governance trial is simultaneously the president's traveling tech principal, and he made the choice to be in Beijing rather than at counsel's table during the closing-argument week. There is no rule against it. There is no precedent for it either at this stake level.

The legal mechanics still favor patience. The jury is advisory. The remedies belong to Gonzalez Rogers. The court docket carries the case as an active proceeding. The May 14 advisory-jury frame still controls the disposition, and the May 15 piece's argument — that a transcript travels and a verdict headline decays by the afternoon — still applies. None of that changes because the plaintiff prefers a Boeing tail number to a counsel chair.

The political mechanics are what change. A president taking the founder of one major AI company on a state visit while that founder is suing the founder of another major AI company is not a normal civic posture. It does not require a theory of impropriety to be unusual. It is a fact about how AI principals now travel and where their litigation calendars rank. Molo's apology to the jury was professional. It was also evidence.

X has been quick to call this oligarchic statecraft. The phrase is hyperbolic in the way slogans are hyperbolic and useful in the way slogans are useful. The narrower observation is that the plaintiff was unavailable for his own closing arguments because he was on Air Force One. That is not a frame; it is a transcript artifact.

The judge's reaction matters more than the jury's. Gonzalez Rogers has been careful about scheduling, careful about admonishments, and careful about the line between courtroom decorum and political theater. Her handling of the recall question — if Musk is in fact recalled — will set the tone for the remedies order. If she chooses to make no public issue of it, the absence will register only as a footnote. If she does, the absence becomes part of the record on which the equitable remedy turns.

The next milestone remains the judge's order on the advisory verdict and the remedies request. The closing-argument week's other artifact is now Molo's apology, and that artifact will outlast the news cycle for one good reason. The transcript will say it. Transcripts age slowly. The plane to Beijing will not be remembered for what it carried. The empty chair beside Molo will.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco