A federal jury in Oakland sided with Sam Altman and OpenAI on May 18, 2026, ruling that Elon Musk had waited too long to sue. Musk called it a “calendar technicality” and announced an appeal. The story was the top finance / tech item on X within hours.
Our deployer watchers picked up the rest of the story.
Same-day deploy spike: +114%
We track every new ERC-20 deployed on Ethereum and score it against 80+ on-chain signals. Filtering for “Musk / Grok / Altman / OpenAI / xAI” in the token name or symbol:
| Date | Branded tokens deployed | Confirmed scams (risk 70+) |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-05-16 | 2 | 2 |
| 2026-05-17 (day before verdict) | 7 | 5 |
| 2026-05-18 (verdict day) | 15 | 11 |
| 2026-05-19 (so far, half day) | 4 | 4 |
15 deploys on the day vs 7 the day before is a +114% jump. 73% of the new tokens scored 70 or higher on our scam risk index. Every token deployed since then has scored a confirmed scam.
What got deployed
These are the live contract addresses our scoring engine flagged on May 18. Every link goes to the RektRadar verdict page; do not buy any of them.
| Token | Symbol | Risk score | Address |
|---|---|---|---|
| make Grok Build great | MGBG | 100 | 0xc35d…a838e |
| make Grok Build great | MGBG | 100 | 0x18e5…b827 |
| Elost Musk | ELOST | 89 | 0xdcb8…42cf |
| Elong Musk | ELONG | 89 | 0x175f…2f45 |
| GrokNeuralinkTeslaStarlink | GNTS | 80 | 0x69d4…3585 |
| OPENAI’S PET | CODISCO | 80 | 0x6bc2…4242 |
| make Grok Build great | MGBG | 80 | 0x278f…d29a |
| ELOST MUKS | ELOST | 70 | 0x15f5…5212 |
| Make Grok Build great | MGBG | 70 | 0xb450…6350 |
| Make Grok Build Great | MGBG | 70 | 0x1553…73f5 |
| Elong Musk | ELONG | 70 | 0x2a00…8098 |
Four separate deployers all chose the MGBG ticker, three on the exact same template (“make Grok Build great”). When a name trends, scammers do not bother with originality.
Why this matters
Scam deployers do not need to be early. They need to be fast. The window between a name trending and retail searching for “the official token” is the goldmine, and they tool up for it.
We have seen the same pattern around:
- The $xAI / $SAM / $AGI cluster (cumulative 90-day view: $xAI is 100% scam, $SAM 40%, $AGI 42%, $MUSK 42%).
- The Claude brand-jack rugs deployed within hours of every new Anthropic announcement.
- The 10 most brand-jacked tickers tracked in our aggregate top-10 piece.
The mechanism is the same every time. A name trends. Deployers spin up tokens within hours. Liquidity gets seeded. A buy-tax or transfer-restrict honeypot is wired in. Twitter does the marketing for free.
How to not get drained
If you actually want exposure to “the official thing”, buy the official thing. There is no liquid Musk-vs-Altman token on Ethereum, and there will not be one - both companies are private equity.
If you are a researcher, journalist, or just curious which contract is which, paste the address on rektradar.io - risk score, honeypot test, deployer cluster, and the full flag list show up in about 10 seconds, no signup.
Live feed of new scam detections: rektradar.io/feed. We re-run the scoring engine on every contract created on Ethereum, all day.
Methodology
Data pulled May 19, 2026 morning from our PostgreSQL token_analysis table. We filter on name and symbol for the patterns musk, altman, openai, xai, grok, elong, elost, jewlon. Risk score is the 0-100 aggregate output of our analyzer (80+ signals: honeypot simulation, bytecode similarity to known rug templates, liquidity, deployer cluster size, etc.). A score of 70 or above is treated as a confirmed scam in our taxonomy.
The full list, including the four tokens flagged in the partial May 19 window, is searchable on the public site. Every address links to its own analysis page with the complete flag breakdown.