Elon Musk and Morgan Chu make for an odd pair.
At first glance, it’s not hard to understand why Musk hired Chu to sue artificial intelligence company OpenAI earlier this year in state court in San Francisco. The trial lawyer has compiled a storied record of ringing the bell against big technology companies, including a $2.3 billion judgment against Intel.
Chu’s powers of persuasion over a jury are a threat that would make any company pay attention, even one with the swagger and Microsoft-lined pockets of OpenAI. But digging even a little deeper into the attorney’s long history begs the question of why Musk selected Chu, and even more curious, why Chu accepted Musk as a client.
Chu, a lawyer at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles, is “incredibly expensive” but worth it, said Matthew Zinn, the chief legal officer at Matterport and former general counsel at TiVo. Chu represented TiVo for years in litigation against Dish Network, AT&T, Verizon, and others, Zinn said. Always dressed in a bowtie, “he comes across as a super nice guy, and has a way of getting to the crux of the issue in a disarming way,” he said.
With his success, Chu has been a major, if understated, donor to a historic institution for ethnic studies programs and racial justice research. In stark contrast, Musk has expressed antipathy for the programs of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, aligned with the institute Chu has helped sustain. Combined with the hatred and racism critics say Musk has allowed to flourish on his social media platform, X, the billionaire’s attitudes would seem antithetical to Chu’s core beliefs.
“I think lawyers do, and should, take on unpopular clients all the time,” Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School, said in an email. “The case is high-profile and interesting, and perhaps that was enough to motivate him to take it.”
While legal experts agree that Morgan Chu can’t be blamed for representing Musk, many also say on background what Lemley is willing to say on-record: that they couldn’t stomach the billionaire as a client.
“Elon Musk has done more damage to the world of late than virtually anyone except Trump,” Lemley said. “I'd hate to work for him (and I say this as someone who bought his first Tesla in 2009).”
Musk is worth about $195 billion, according to Forbes, making him the world’s second- or third-richest person depending on the hour or day. Besides being the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, in 2022 he acquired and transformed social media company Twitter into X. He is polarizing on the platform, where, as its owner, he posts prolifically from a tall soapbox, wielding his influence over any cultural debate.
Morgan Chu, by contrast, isn’t nearly as well known as even his middle brother, Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner and former Energy Secretary under President Barack Obama. (The Chus are an accomplished bunch; his oldest brother, Gilbert Chu, is a professor of oncology and biochemistry at Stanford.)
But aside from his legal renown, Morgan Chu is celebrated in smaller circles for his endowment of UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures. In February, he and his wife, Helen Chu, gave the institute $10 million to advance its work, according to the university. It was the institute’s largest single donation but hardly the couple’s first since they met at UCLA as activists in the 1960s.
For decades, Chu has demonstrated an unwavering passion for the Institute’s goal, which, it says, is to “promote equal opportunity, greater equity and a more just society.” In a statement to the Los Angeles Times in February, which UCLA posted on X, he said the reason for his support is “pretty simple.”
“We will have a better world, a better society, if people understand one another,” Chu said.
Chu didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story. Neither did Musk through Tesla and X.
The Institute’s goal is aligned with, and in all likelihood helped shape the DEI initiatives that have taken hold at many companies and schools across the United States, especially in light of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and which have stirred a national debate, provoked a backlash and enraged opponents.
One of its loudest — or certainly most influential — opponents is Musk, who has tried to turn the DEI debate on its head by arguing white men are its victims. “‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ are propaganda words for racism, sexism and other -isms,” Musk posted on X in December. “This is just as morally wrong as any other racism and sexism. Changing the target class doesn’t make it right!”
Last month on X he posted an internal document of “Inclusion Standards” from the Walt Disney Company, describing them as “the full racist, sexist, etc discriminatory set of laws enforced by Disney’s DEI Gestapo.”
Musk has said he acquired X in a bid to extinguish the “woke mind virus,” a reference to left-leaning ideology that he believes suppressed right-wing thinking at Twitter and threatens to kill western civilization.
More recently, a judge in a different case in San Francisco federal court tossed out a lawsuit Musk filed against the Center for Countering Digital Hate. The organization has published reports tracking posts on X that promote antisemitism, anti-Black hatred, other forms of racism, neo-Nazism and white supremacy.
Eighty-six percent of the posts, and 90 percent of the accounts behind them, remained on X after they were reported, in violation of its policies against hateful content, according to CCDH. The organization also said it found ads on X from dozens of companies, including Apple and Disney, next to hateful posts.
The resulting exodus of advertisers from X prompted Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” to sue the CCDH, claiming it had illegally scraped data from the social media platform. In throwing the case out, the judge handling it concluded that Musk's lawsuit was “unabashedly and vociferously” aimed at silencing the CCDH, in violation of their free speech rights.
So far, at least, Chu has divorced any objection he has to Musk's attitudes towards DEI, or the billionaire's resistance to policing hate on X that feeds the ignorance the lawyer has spent millions of dollars over decades fighting.
Lawyers who know Chu say he may be setting aside meaningful differences with Musk for the chance to wade into the fight roiling the world of artificial intelligence.
In the complaint against OpenAI, Chu depicts an omniscient Super Musk whose warnings about the dangers of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, have largely fallen on deaf ears. An early investor in OpenAI, Musk argues the company’s CEO Sam Altman has betrayed its original nonprofit mission to build its systems to benefit humans.
Musk’s commonly shared general concern is that AGI will soon surpass human intelligence. “If a machine can solve nearly any task better than we can, that machine becomes more economically useful than we are,” Chu writes in the complaint. Altman violated OpenAI’s founding principles by becoming a for-profit subsidiary of investor Microsoft, according to the suit. In January, OpenAI disclosed a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment from Microsoft.
Musk is seeking uncalculated damages, beginning with the $44 million he says he invested in OpenAI.
The lawsuit has just gotten started. In an early response, OpenAI said in a court filing that Musk early on supported a for-profit structure for OpenAI that he would control, and dropped out when he didn’t get what he wanted. Musk has since started his own for-profit AI company, OpenAI argues, filing the lawsuit “to advance his own commercial interests.”
Chu may be taken by the legal and societal issues the case presents, and his decision to represent Musk no matter how inconsistent the work may be to his set of beliefs is up to him, said Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus of legal ethics at New York University.
“Many clients are obnoxious people or worse, who one would never befriend,” Gillers said. “But lawyers don't represent all of a client's life, only the client's legal interests in the particular matter.”
