“Hire a clown, get a circus” Elon Musk’s lawyer has a side job that will get you laughing

There was a major development in the yearslong feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over the origins of OpenAI on Wednesday. A US District Judge in Oakland, California determined that there is “plenty of evidence” to allow Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, which he co-founded and Altman heads, to proceed to a jury trial.

The tech billionaire alleges that the maker of ChatGPT violated its founding mission when it decided to restructure from a non-profit to a for-profit entity. As well that OpenAI abandoned its humanitarian mission to make public its research and technology from the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) by giving Microsoft, who is also a defendant in the suit, an exclusive license to some of its technology, and not revealing the internal design of the company’s latest version of the popular chatbot.

Altman for his part has made counterclaims that Musk left OpenAI after only being briefly involved in OpenAI’s infancy and is seeking to undermine the company to give his own artificial intelligence projects, xAI and Grok, a leg up in the race to dominate the field for the revolutionary technology. “Musk’s lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment,” OpenAI said in a statement, adding, “we look forward to demonstrating this at trial.”

While OpenAI and Microsoft are being defended by a phalanx of elite law firms with deep experience in Silicon Valley disputes, Musk chose to go with “a pair of boutique litigation shops” reports Business Insider. One of the plaintiff’s lawyers may have caused his counterparts to second guess his courtroom prowess given his side gig.

The clown in the room

Jaymie Parkkinen, an associate at Toberoff & Associates, is one of the key strategists on Musk’s legal team but when he’s not in the courtroom he has quite a different profession, clown. Not in sense of the “Ronald McDonald birthday party kind of stuff,” but more “akin to the high-concept physical comedy of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Lucille Ball,” he explained to Business Insider.

“All of my comedy friends — none of them can believe I’m a lawyer… And none of my lawyer friends can believe I do clown,” Parkkinen told the publication.

He uses the word “clown” as others would “improv” or “comedy,” with which he says his art form has much in common. Parkkinen, who also runs fitness worshops through his “Clown Cardio” business, told the publication that in his performances, rules are set up for the audience that they then are supposed to break.

“When you strip away all the social masks that we all wear, if you strip away gender and politics and money and status and power, and you’re just your raw human self without all of the trappings of society — who are you? And clown tries to answer that question,” the legal eagle said.

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