Featured Image Credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Topics: Elon Musk, Artificial Intelligence, Court
William Morgan
Topics: Elon Musk, Artificial Intelligence, Court
If you are the richest man in the world with a net worth of $718 billion, facing a tough battle in the courts over the future of AI, you would expect your legal team to be filled with the most expensive, serious lawyers.
But it turns out that one of Elon Musk's top legal minds in his 'Clash of the Tech Titans' battle with fellow OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman moonlights as something you'd probably never want your legal representative to be.
This top lawyer with a rather bizarre side job is Jaymie Parkkinen, who was a key advocate in court during the discovery phase of Musk's dispute with OpenAI and Microsoft over Altman making the start-up into a for-profit business.
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Despite being effective in the courtroom, Parkkinen is a clown. No really, Musk's lawyer is an actual working clown.
Parkkinen, of Toberoff & Associates, told Business Insider that neither side of his life can quite believe the other.
"All of my comedy friends — none of them can believe I'm a lawyer," he said. "And none of my lawyer friends can believe I do clown."
He even runs his own workshop using his talents, called 'Clown Cardio'. But the accomplished lawyer/clown does not simply put down his briefcase, paint a smile on his face, and put on a bad wig.
Perhaps fittingly for a lawyer, Parkkinen practises a more cerebral form of clowning, one that doesn't include honking your nose and terrifying half the audience.
He described it as being more like the physical comedy of Charlie Chaplin with a healthy dose of 'improv'.
Unlike his heavily prepared legal briefs, all of Parkkinen's acts are completely improvised, with him setting up expectations and rules for the crowd and then attempting to break them, hopefully with the effect of making them laugh.
He explained: "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."
In fact, a lot of his act is more like metaphorical clowning. The example that Parkkinen gave Insider was a performance where he told the audience he could not say the letter 'M' for the rest of the show, which he would then do repeatedly to gauge the audience's reaction.
He said: "It kind of becomes like this juggling act, metaphorically speaking.
"How can I keep this show going? How can I be a believable character, but also never use the letter M? And the audience is watching closely for those kinds of cues."
Parkkinen said that, rather than holding him back, leading a double life as a clown had actually helped in court.
He added: "At the end of the day, it's just about connecting with people, and so is being a lawyer. You're connecting with a judge, a jury, opposing counsel."