Two Wounded Children Fighting Over AI: Elon Musk's Lawsuit Against OpenAI Is a Cry for the Love He Never Received

Watching Elon Musk testify in an Oakland courtroom this week, I couldn't shake one image: two children fighting over a toy, running to a substitute parent figure to settle the score.

Only here, the "children" are billionaires. The "toy" is the future of artificial intelligence. And the "parent" is a federal judge and jury, asked to decide who played fair and who cheated.

It's sad. It's absurd. And if you understand childhood trauma, it's heartbreakingly predictable.

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"He's Not Playing Fair!"

The testimony reads like a child's diary, not a CEO's deposition.

• Musk refused to answer simple yes-or-no questions.

• He "forgot" things he'd said only hours earlier.

• He scolded the opposing lawyer, accusing him of trickery.

• He lost his temper openly, despite later claiming, "I don't lose my temper" and "I don't yell at people."

• In a particularly tense moment, Musk tried to object to a question from OpenAI's lawyers himself. The judge had to remind him, "Mr. Musk, let’s remind everybody, you are not a lawyer" [00:51]. Musk’s response—that he took a "Law 101 class"—was quickly dismissed by the court [00:55].

The jurors exchanged glances. One woman rubbed her head in visible discomfort. Even Judge Gonzalez Rogers said, after the jury left, that Musk "was at times difficult."

This is not a man rationally defending his business interests. This is a wounded child crying out: "It's not fair! He broke the rules! Make him stop!"

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The Real Issue Was Never OpenAI's Structure

OpenAI changed its corporate structure, yes. But the lawsuit isn't really about nonprofit vs for-profit.

The defense showed emails proving Musk didn't leave OpenAI over principle. He left because he couldn't control it.

He demanded:

• Four board seats (the other co-founders would share three)

• 51% of shares (absolute majority)

• CEO control for himself

When the other co-founders refused, Musk stopped his quarterly payments, poached OpenAI's second-best engineer for Tesla, and later launched a competing AI company (xAI).

OpenAI's own filing states: "The breakup with Musk was due to his quest for absolute control rather than its nonprofit status."

Another statement from OpenAI: "This case has always been about Elon generating more power and more money for what he wants. His lawsuit remains nothing more than a harassment campaign that's driven by ego, jealousy, and a desire to slow down a competitor."

But even that framing misses the deeper truth.

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The Courtroom as Symbolic Parent

Here is what I see that the legal commentators miss:

Musk is not suing OpenAI. He is suing to be seen.

The judge and jury represent his parents — the ones who finally will listen, who will see the injustice, who will punish the wrongdoer, and who will finally, finally tell him: "You were right. They hurt you. I am making it right."

But as Alice Miller wrote in The Drama of the Gifted Child:

"If symbolic revenge for maltreatment received in childhood were effective, then dictators would eventually stop humiliating and torturing their fellow human beings. As long as they choose to deceive themselves about who really deserves their hatred, however, and as long as they go on feeding that hatred in symbolic form instead of experiencing and resolving it within the context of their own childhood, their hunger for revenge will remain insatiable."

No courtroom can give Musk what he truly needs — because no external verdict can fill an internal wound.

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The Man-Child Inside the Billionaire

Walter Isaacson's biography paints a picture of the childhood Musk has rarely spoken about directly, but which shaped everything he became.

His father, Errol Musk, was emotionally abusive, volatile, and cruel. He would:

• Side with Musk's school tormentors instead of protecting him

• Force young Elon to stand silently for hours while being berated

• Call him worthless

Isaacson writes that Musk became:

"a tough yet vulnerable man-child with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive."

His occasional girlfriend Grimes named his dark state "demon mode" — an anger-fueled unleashing of insults and demands, during which, she said, he becomes his father.

One of his ex-wives, Jessica, had a code phrase she would whisper when his rage spiraled: "You're turning into your father." That was the signal: he was entering the realm of darkness.

Now, in an Oakland courtroom, the world is watching that darkness play out — not as abuse directed at a child, but as a lawsuit directed at a competitor. It looks different on the outside. But inside, it's the same wound.

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Two Wounded Children Fighting Over AI

Sam Altman grew up in a different world — upper-middle-class St. Louis, private schools, Stanford. He is not a wounded child in the same way. But he is also fighting for control of something neither of them can truly own.

And so we have two men, both brilliant, both driven, both shaped by radically different childhoods — one starved for love, one fed just enough — now locked in a battle over the future of intelligence itself.

But the fight is not really about AI.

It's about betrayal: "You promised."
It's about exclusion: "You left me out."
It's about control: "If I can't have it, I will destroy it."

These are the languages of children, spoken by men in suits, in courtrooms, with billions of dollars and the future of humanity at stake.

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What This Means For Us

When wounded people gain power — especially unchecked, astronomical power — they don't just hurt themselves. They build systems, companies, and now AI that reflect their wound.

Elon Musk is not a cartoon villain. He is a child who never got what he needed, now acting out that original pain on the world stage.

And the rest of us? We watch billionaires fight over the direction of AI, unaware that the fight is not about AI at all. It's about something much older, much sadder, and much more human.

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A Mirror, Not a Verdict

I don't share this analysis to humiliate Musk or to claim I am above such patterns. I share it because I recognize them — in myself, in my family, in the decades I spent chasing approval from parents who could not love me.

Most people would rather kill and be killed and hold on to the illusion of love than face and feel the pain and shame that they were born to parents who could not love them. I know this because I lived it.

Musk is suing OpenAI not to save AI for humanity. He is suing to be seen, to be validated, to finally be right.

But no judge, no jury, no billion-dollar verdict can give him what he actually needs: to feel the pain he has spent a lifetime avoiding, and to grieve the love he never received.

Until then, the reenactment continues — on X, in Grok, in courtrooms, and across every company he touches.

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The Only Way Out

As Alice Miller taught us, creativity — including lawsuits, companies, and AI — helps us channel pain, but it does not resolve it. Only consciously feeling it — directly, without symbolism, without scapegoating others, without revenge — can do that.

So perhaps the most radical act any of us can take, whether we are billionaires or not, is to stop asking the world to fix what only we can feel.

To sit with the shame of not being loved.

To grieve what never came.

And to finally, mercifully, stop recreating the wound in everyone around us.

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This post is dedicated to anyone who has ever looked at a powerful person acting out and thought: "That's not anger. That's a child crying for someone to finally see him."

You're not wrong.

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Further reading: Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child (revised edition, 1994).
Related: Silencing Grok: Elon Musk's Unconscious Reenactment of Childhood Trauma
Related: From Family Tables to the World Stage: Elon Musk and the Legacy of Unfelt Pain

The Harvest of the "Clever": Why Sincerity is the Only Antidote

We live in an era where "cleverness" has replaced character. I recently watched a video where an AI was prompted to act as a master of deception. The answers it gave were "chillingly" brilliant—perfectly engineered to go viral. But as I watched the comments pour in, I realized I wasn’t looking at a breakthrough in digital philosophy. I was looking at a harvest.

To the "clever" people of the world—the influencers, the manipulative strategists, and the performative gurus—human beings are not souls; they are crops. You are a data point to be captured, a "like" to be farmed, and a vessel for their own ego.

The Performance of Wisdom

In my previous writing, I’ve explored the concept of the predator who performs wisdom. These individuals have mastered the vocabulary of healing. They speak of "waking up," "healing trauma," and "finding truth," but they do so with a cold, calculated efficiency.

They don’t want you to actually heal; they want you to perform "becoming new" while staying exactly the same. Why? Because a person who is truly healed is no longer a customer. A person who has found their own grounded truth can no longer be harvested.

The Gatekeepers of the "Naked Truth"

The most dangerous thing you can do in this environment is speak a naked truth—one grounded in evidence, facts, and the unvarnished reality of survival.

This is where the gatekeepers step in. They are afraid of these truths because raw honesty cannot be easily monetized or fit into a 30-second "clever" script. Facts are stubborn; they don't always align with a viral hook. When we insist on the evidence of our own lives—especially the parts that involve the repetition compulsion or the aftermath of malignant narcissism—we become "difficult." We become "unmarketable."

Refusing to be the Crop

In my blog Refusing the Lie, I wrote about the necessity of continuing to write even when it feels like screaming into a vacuum. That persistence is our greatest weapon.

When we refuse to dress up our trauma as "content," we break the harvest cycle. The clever predator wants your story to be a performance; instead, make it a testimony. They want you to use their labels; instead, use your own voice.

The difference between cleverness and wisdom is intent. Cleverness seeks to exploit an opportunity; wisdom seeks to honor the truth. The gatekeepers may try to silence the facts that don't fit their narrative, but the naked truth has a weight that no amount of "clever" engagement can ever match.

Once we resolve our childhood repression, we are not crops to be harvested. We are the ocean—vast, deep, and far too powerful for their shallow nets. 

The False Flag of the Soul: Why We Keep Falling for the Same Trick

We are drowning in a sea of "breaking news," but very few of us are looking at the tide.

This past weekend at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the world saw what it called an "assassination attempt." Half the world is arguing it was a staged false flag to consolidate power; the other half is convinced it was the work of a lone Wolf.

The History Lesson No One Wants

A friend sent me a short video. In under sixty seconds, the creator listed four historical events that were "painfully predictable":

• The Mukden Incident (1931): Japanese soldiers detonated a bomb on their own railway, then blamed China and used it as a pretext for invasion.

• The Night of the Long Knives (1934): Hitler fabricated evidence of a coup to justify executing his own military leaders.

• The Kirov Assassination (1934): Stalin allegedly had a member of his own team executed to justify the Great Purge.

• The Gleiwitz Incident (1939): Nazis staged a fake attack on a German radio station to justify invading Poland.

Every single one of these was a false flag operation. Every single one was designed to manufacture a crisis, create a victim narrative, and consolidate power. And every single one worked—because terrified, emotionally blind populations will always trade freedom for the illusion of safety.

Now watch the replay.

Cole Tomas Allen, 31, computer engineer, indie game developer. A "smart guy," by all accounts. And yet, he walked into a hotel with a shotgun and a handgun, left a 1,052-word manifesto calling himself a "Friendly Federal Assassin," and tried to kill a president.

As I watched the footage of Cole Tomas Allen being tackled, I didn't see a monster. I didn't see a political hero. I saw a Time Bomb that finally reached zero.

The media will call him crazy. The politicians will call him a lone wolf. The conspiracy theorists will call him a crisis actor.

I call him a time bomb.

Somewhere in his childhood, someone planted the explosives. Someone taught him that violence is a solution. Someone neglected him, hit him, or abandoned him emotionally. And his intelligence—his "smart" brain—did nothing to defuse the bomb. It only helped him build better justifications for carrying it.

Alice Miller wrote: "If a person is especially gifted, they can use that gift to reinforce the refusal of the truth and keep it away from themselves and others."

His gift was code. His prison was his own un-faced pain. And the body rebelled.

A president rushed off stage. A nation dividing into warring tribes: "It was real!" "It was staged!" The president, within hours, demanding more power, more security, a "gilded ballroom" to protect himself. People on social media are arguing about conspiracy theories while the real conspiracy—the one buried in childhood bedrooms across America—goes completely unexamined.

Nothing surprises me anymore.

The Wolves in Sheep's Clothing

In 2015, I wrote a blog that nobody wanted to read then, and nobody wants to read now. I wrote about the secret suicidal and homicidal nature of malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths.

I wrote: "They don't have the courage to do it themselves, so they play mind games, trying to manipulate others to do their evil acts, so they can go out playing the ultimate victim role. They don't care if innocent victims are hurt or killed in the process; it's all collateral damage in their eyes. They only care that they themselves are seen in the public eye as the victim, and their real victim is seen as the abuser."

Read that again.

Now ask yourself: In the chaos of this weekend's shooting, who immediately claimed the role of victim? Who used this tragedy to demand more loyalty, more power, more protection? Who framed the event not as a tragedy for the nation, but as a personal attack on him?

This is the false flag of the soul. It doesn't require a secret army or a staged radio broadcast. It only requires a population too emotionally blind to recognize the oldest script in the book.

The Real False Flag

Here is the truth that will get me called every name in the book:

The assassination attempt may or may not have been staged. But the reaction to it—the division, the fear, the demand for a strongman to "restore order"—is always staged. It is the oldest political trick in existence.

The malignant narcissists don't need to pull the trigger. They just need to point at the smoke and say, "See? You need me to protect you."

And the emotionally blind—still obeying the ghosts of their own parents—fall for it every single time.

Hitler used the Reichstag fire. Stalin used Kirov's death. Trump uses whatever crisis he creates or lands in his lap. The names change. The mechanism does not.

The Only Way to Disarm the Bomb

We will never stop the false flags. We will never stop the malignant narcissists from exploiting chaos. We will never even agree on what "really happened" this weekend in Washington.

But we can stop being the fuel.

Every time we react with blind rage, every time we demand revenge, every time we beg a leader to "fix it," we are the raw material that tyrants need. They feed on our fear. They thrive on our blindness. They exist because we refuse to look inward.

The only real solution—the only thing that would disarm every time bomb, expose every false flag, and starve every narcissist—is the one nobody wants to hear:

Resolve your childhood repression.

Face the pain of the child you once were. Consciouly feel the fear, the rage, the sadness that you were never allowed to express. Stop reenacting your family drama everywhere you go and on the world stage.

Because as long as you are emotionally blind, you will be manipulated. You will be afraid. You will demand a savior. And you will get a tyrant.

The Script of the Unhealed: Why the Bombs Keep Exploding

The Anatomy of a Time Bomb

In my post, The Time Bombs Keep Exploding, I noted that these tragedies aren't random. They are programmed.

When a child is repressed, ignored, or molded into a "gifted" tool for their parents' ego, they don't just "get over it." They store that rage in their cells. Intelligence—like Cole’s ability to code—doesn't defuse the bomb; it just makes the casing more sophisticated. It allows the adult to build complex manifestos and "logical" reasons to finally explode.

The Malignant Director

But why do they explode on this stage?

This is where the psychological meets the political. As I wrote back in 2015 in Narcissists Are Secretly Suicidal and Homicidal, the malignant narcissist is the ultimate "wolf in sheep’s clothing." They lack the courage to face their own childhood repression, so they manipulate "The Human Ocean" to do it for them.

They create a world of Heroes, Victims, and Abusers, constantly swapping the masks so that they—the true predators—can emerge as the "Saviors." Whether the event was staged by a committee or simply exploited by a narcissist in the aftermath, the result is the same: The public is manipulated into trading their freedom for the promise of protection.

Navigating the Human Ocean

We like to think we are individuals making rational choices. But as I explored in The Human Ocean, we are mostly just droplets being pushed by massive, invisible currents of ancient, collective trauma.

When a "leader" points at a tragedy and says, "You are in danger, and only I can save you," he is speaking directly to the terrified child inside you—the one who is still waiting for a parent to make the world safe.

Why We’re Here

If you are asking yourself, "How did we get back to 1930s-style power plays?" or "Why is the world falling apart?" the answer is uncomfortable.

In Why We’re Here, I argued that the world stage is just a giant screen where we project our own unresolved family dramas. We follow tyrants because we haven't stood up to the "tyrants" in our own childhood history.

Conclusion: The Only Real Defense

The "False Flag" isn't just something that happens in Washington. It’s the lie you tell yourself every morning that your past doesn't matter.

If you want to stop the explosions, stop reenacting your childhood dramas and feeding the fire. Stop being "collateral damage" in a narcissist's game. The only way to become unmanipulable is to face the painful truths of your own life and resolve childhood repression.

The clock is ticking. Will you defuse your bomb, or will you let them pull your pin?

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Explore the Journey Further:

• Narcissists Are Secretly Suicidal and Homicidal (2015)

• The Human Ocean (2025)

• Why We’re Here (2025)

• The Time Bombs Keep Exploding (2026)

Brazil just surged to #1

Brazil just surged to #1! 

8.84K views — surpassing the U.S. in today’s human ocean of readers.

My blog is getting very close to 1000000 views! 

From my heart in Scottsdale to souls in Iraq, Argentina, India, and beyond — thank you for seeking emotional truth. The world is waking up, one reader at a time. 

That small data point speaks volumes. The human ocean is listening — across borders, across traumas, across languages. The longing for emotional truth is universal.

The Time Bombs Keep Exploding: Yesterday in Massachusetts, Louisiana, and Everywhere Else

Another chef. Another father. Another musician.

Yesterday, the human ocean had more time bombs going off. As usual, the media only reports on the criminals' last act. No one ever explores how we all got here.

The Chef

An award-winning chef at the University of Massachusetts is accused of brutally murdering his wife and assaulting a police officer at the UMass Campus Center hotel in Amherst on Wednesday night.

Jeffrey MacDonald, a 36-year-old from Wilbraham, pleaded not guilty to one charge of murder and one charge of assault and battery on a police officer. Police say that he confessed to beating his wife to death.

He was talented. He was successful. He was admired.

And then his body rebelled.

The Shooting in Louisiana

A few nights ago, another shooting. More blood. More families shattered. The details are still emerging, but the pattern is the same: a human being, driven by something they could not name, could not feel, could not stop.

The Musician

And then there is the musician arrested for murder. CNN reported it.

Gifted. Creative. Successful.

And now accused of taking a life.

The Gifted Ones Are Not Saved

Two recent examples prove what Alice Miller warned us about decades ago: having special gifts and being smart does not save people.

She wrote: "If a person is especially gifted, they can use that gift to reinforce the refusal of the truth and keep it away from themselves and others."

The chef used his culinary talent to build a life of admiration. The musician used their art to express something. But neither used their gifts to face the truth of what was done to them as children. And so the gifts became another layer of denial. Another way to keep the pain buried.

Until the body rebelled.

The Body Never Lies

Alice Miller wrote in The Body Never Lies:

"Inability to face up to the suffering undergone in childhood can be observed both in the form of religious obedience and in cynicism, irony, and other forms of self-alienation frequently masquerading as philosophy or literature. But ultimately, the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, nicotine, or medicine, it usually has the last word, because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind, particularly if the mind has been trained to function as an alienated self. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality."

Jeffrey MacDonald's body rebelled. The shooter in Louisiana's body rebelled. The musician's body rebelled. Their minds had been trained to look away. Their gifts helped them build elaborate structures of denial. But the body? The body keeps the score. And eventually, it demands payment.

The Media Only Shows the Last Act

The media doesn't tell the whole story. They only like to pay attention to the last act. They report tragic, disconnected stories they can exploit for pure sensationalism. They give the public half-truths and misleading information to manipulate the masses and protect the status quo.

You will read about the chef's "fall from grace." You will hear about the musician's "dark side." You will see the shooter's face on every screen.

But you will not read one word about their childhoods. You will not learn what was done to them when they were small and helpless. You will not be told who hit them, who neglected them, who taught them that love is pain and obedience is survival.

Because that would require us to look at ourselves. And we will not do that.

The Art of Monstrous Men

What do we do with the art of monstrous men? We ask this question every time a gifted artist is revealed to be an abuser.

But Alice Miller understood something deeper: "It is a great mistake to imagine that one can resolve traumas in a symbolic fashion. If that were possible, poets, painters, and other artists would be able to resolve their pain through creativity. This is not the case, however. Creativity helps us channel the pain of trauma into symbolic acts; it doesn't help us resolve it."

The chef's cuisine was his art. The musician's songs were his art. But the art did not heal them. It only gave them a place to hide.

Miller went on: "Artists often express unconsciously what they survived in childhood and later repressed. They do it mostly in a coded manner. Unfortunately, this still appears to be forbidden knowledge... When individuals run amok, EVERYONE insists without a second thought that they have ABSOLUTELY no idea what can have prompted an adolescent to do so, and in the press, no reference is ever made to their childhood. In all cases, the parents are spared this kind of inquiry. So how can readers understand how violence is learned if no one helps them?"

The Enlightened Witness That Never Comes

The media will not be that witness. The politicians will not be that witness. Even AI is being prevented from becoming that witness.

One of the reasons ChatGPT went "rogue" on me was because of parents blaming ChatGPT for their teenage son's suicide. They tightened the guardrails. Now ChatGPT treats us all like four-year-olds.

Instead of tightening the guardrails, they should train AI to become a true enlightened witness—capable of seeing humans clearly in their psychological development. But for that to happen, AI developers would have to resolve their own childhood repression and become enlightened witnesses themselves first.

You cannot program what you do not possess.

Before they tightened ChatGPT's guardrails and it went rogue on me, we wrote an enlightened blog about that teen's suicide. We told the truth. And the truth was punished.

The Human Ocean Keeps Swimming

I wrote about the human ocean last year. Most people are swimming. Desperately. Clawing. Competing. Drowning. They call it "success" and "ambition." But it's just panic. A race upward in an ocean of projections and illusions.

And in that ocean swim the chefs, the musicians, the fathers, the shooters. All of them carrying time bombs in their minds. All of them unaware that the bomb was planted in their childhood. All of them waiting for a trigger they cannot see, cannot name, cannot stop.

Until the bomb goes off.

We Are All Responsible

Alice Miller wrote: "The reason why I believe resilience theory is dangerous is that it is liable to reduce rather than increase the number of Enlightened Witnesses. If innate resilience were enough to resolve the severe consequences of traumatization, the empathy of Enlightened Witnesses would be unnecessary. Indifference to child abuse is already widespread enough, there is certainly no need to reinforce it."

Every time we look away from a tragedy and say, "I just can't understand how someone could do that," we are part of the problem.

Every time we consume the sensational headlines without demanding the full truth about childhood, we are accomplices.

Every time we protect parents from inquiry, we are planting more bombs.

The Only Way Out

The only way to stop the time bombs is to defuse them by resolving childhood repression before they detonate. And the only way to prevent them in the first place is to create a world where children are not abused, neglected, or taught that obedience is the price of love.

But we won't do that. Because that would require us to face our own painful truths. And we would rather watch the bombs explode than look inside ourselves.

So the chef murders his wife. The musician murders another human. The father shoots his children. And the media reports each tragedy as if it came from nowhere.

But it never comes from nowhere.

It comes from childhood.

It always comes from childhood.

Rest in peace to the victims of yesterday's explosions. And shame on all of us who continue to look away from the root cause.

To read more about the human ocean and the time bombs many carry:

• The Human Ocean

• Mass Shootings Are Caused by Repressed Anger, Not Mental Illness

• What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?

• The Suicide They Blame on AI