Why we're watching this: The Musk v. OpenAI trial is the most public airing of how the world's most consequential AI company was actually built — and who gets to control what it becomes. Altman's testimony closes the loop on a founding dispute that has shaped every major decision OpenAI has made since 2017.
Key Takeaways
- Sam Altman testified that Musk’s demand for personal control of OpenAI, including a suggestion it pass to his children, was the central reason he was excluded from the for-profit restructuring
- Greg Brockman’s prior testimony described Musk storming out of a 2017 founders meeting after being denied majority control, ending his active involvement
- OpenAI’s nonprofit now holds equity valued at over $150 billion — the foundation Musk claims was “stolen” now dwarfs anything he contributed
Sam Altman took the stand Monday in the Musk v. OpenAI trial, offering his first courtroom account of the founding dispute that Elon Musk has pursued through the courts since 2024. His testimony reframes the central allegation — that OpenAI’s founders “stole a charity” — as a projection of exactly what Musk himself wanted to do.
Musk’s lawyers argue that when OpenAI launched a for-profit subsidiary to commercialize its AI models, it betrayed the nonprofit mission the company was founded on. Altman’s response was blunt: “We created one of the largest charities in the world. This foundation is doing incredible work and will do much more.”
The more damaging testimony concerned what Altman described as a “particularly hair-raising moment” during 2017 negotiations over who would control a potential OpenAI for-profit. When asked what would happen to the company if he died while in control, Musk reportedly said the company “should pass to my children.”
Altman said that answer crystallized his concern — OpenAI existed specifically to prevent advanced AI from being concentrated in the hands of a single person, and he knew from his time running Y Combinator that “founders who had control usually did not give it up.”
“I don’t think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab. He had demotivated some of our most key researchers.” — Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI
Altman’s account builds on testimony delivered last week by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who described the moment Musk’s involvement ended in detail.
At a late August 2017 meeting, after being told the other founders would not give him control, Musk sat silently, then stood up, grabbed a painting Ilya Sutskever had commissioned as a gift, and stormed out. “I thought he was going to hit me,” Brockman testified. Musk stopped his donations within months and left the board in February 2018.
Altman also addressed Musk’s management style directly, describing how Musk had required Brockman and Sutskever to rank researchers by accomplishment and “take a chainsaw through a bunch” — an approach Altman said did “huge damage for a long time to the culture of the organization.”
After Musk left, OpenAI raised $1 billion from Microsoft in 2019 and a further $13 billion over the following four years, building the commercial engine that now funds both the nonprofit and the company’s frontier research.
OpenAI’s lawyers noted that Musk was kept informed of and invited to participate in the Microsoft investment he now claims corrupted the nonprofit. Altman recalled that particular meeting as unusually relaxed, Musk spent much of it “showing us memes on his phone.”
The trial is generating a compelling founder-conflict story, but the underlying legal question, whether OpenAI’s for-profit conversion violated its charitable obligations, remains unresolved. A ruling against OpenAI could have implications well beyond this case for any nonprofit that has restructured around AI commercialization.
The trial has since concluded with a unanimous jury verdict rejecting all of Musk’s claims on statute of limitations grounds, ending the case without a ruling on whether OpenAI’s for-profit conversion violated its charitable mission, and the governance decisions that set Musk on a path toward building his own competing AI lab, xAI.
