Elizabeth Lopatto is a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg. Yesterday, in Musk v. Altman , before the jurors came in, Sam Altman’s team passed up what looked — from a distance — like a little league trophy. It was not. Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had the lawyers read the inscription aloud for the press: “Never stop being a jackass.” It’s a commemoration OpenAI employees bought for research scientist Josh Achiam, who testified yesterday. How exactly did this come up in a trial about nonprofit contract law ? Allegedly, when Elon Musk was leaving OpenAI, he talked about wanting to race ahead of Google. Achiam, who worked on AI safety, asked if that was really such a good idea. Musk called him a jackass. Years later, Musk is portraying his lawsuit as an attempt to avoid AI causing serious harm — something that, Altman’s team suggests, wasn’t high on his list of concerns back then.…