Elon Musk’s greatest legacy will be as a provider of inane law school exam hypotheticals.
Yes, I know it's a Verge link, but I found the explanation of the legal failings quite funny, and I think it's "important" we keep track of which obscenely rich people are mad at each other so we can choose which of their kingdoms to be serfs in.
Did you read the sentence directly after? They never claimed that non-written contracts don't exist, they said they are very hard to uphold in court, which is perfectly true:
proving that an unwritten contract exists, what its terms are, and if they are enforceable is extraordinarily difficult, and courts do not like doing it, especially for ultra-sophisticated parties with a long history of dealing.
Saying “they need to be written down” and then immediately negating that point is absolutely terrible writing. And even a casual contract, like OpenAI’s where they literally have stated in writing for years what their “contract” is, would not be hard to understand.
Musk is a moron and this is clearly a ploy to gain some sort of control over OpenAI, but OpenAI is breaking what they said their goal was. I know that doesn’t mean there’s a contract there, but it has been written down numerous times what he’s claiming “the contract” is.