OpenAI president Greg Brockman testified this week that Elon Musk pushed in 2017 to convert OpenAI into a for-profit under his majority control, and that Musk tried to recruit Sam Altman to run a rival AI lab inside Tesla. The testimony, delivered in U.S. District Court in Oakland, California on May 8, 2026, is the centerpiece of week two of the trial in which Musk is seeking up to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft and asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles.
The stakes for both sides are concrete. OpenAI is moving toward an IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion, while Musk's xAI, now folded into SpaceX, is targeting a combined public listing as early as June at $1.75 trillion. Musk has already donated $38 million to OpenAI; he claims he was misled into doing so on the understanding the company would remain a nonprofit.
Brockman's account flips that narrative. He testified that in summer 2017, after an OpenAI model beat the world's best Dota 2 players, Musk hosted a gathering at his house near San Francisco and emailed: 'Time to make the next step for OpenAI. This is the triggering event.' Over the next six weeks, according to Brockman, Musk and the other cofounders negotiated a for-profit structure in which Musk would hold majority equity, name a majority of the board, and serve as CEO.
Key facts
- 01Greg Brockman testified Musk demanded majority equity, board control and the CEO role at a proposed OpenAI for-profit in August 2017.
- 02Shivon Zilis confirmed Musk tried to recruit Sam Altman to run a Tesla AI lab and asked Andrej Karpathy for a list of OpenAI staff to poach.
- 03Musk is seeking up to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft and wants Altman and Brockman removed.
- 04OpenAI is approaching a $1 trillion IPO valuation; Musk's combined SpaceX/xAI is targeting $1.75 trillion as soon as June.
- 05Brockman's 2017 journal, shown in court, included the line 'Financially what will take me to $1B?'
The talks broke down in August 2017. Brockman said that when he and Ilya Sutskever proposed equal equity shares among the cofounders, Musk replied 'I decline,' stood up, 'stormed around the table,' grabbed a painting of a Tesla that Sutskever had brought as a goodwill gift, and left. 'There was a fork in the road,' Brockman told the jury. 'The one thing we could not accept was to hand him unilateral, absolute control, potentially, over the AGI.'
“Brockman now holds an OpenAI stake worth close to $30 billion, a figure Musk's lawyer used to argue greed, not mission, drove the 2017 push toward a for-profit.”— Jaeden Schafer
Musk's lawyer Steven Molo pressed Brockman on motive, noting that Brockman never invested cash but now holds an OpenAI stake worth close to $30 billion. 'Why didn't you take the $29 billion and donate it to the nonprofit that you had a fiduciary duty to, for the good of humanity?' Molo asked. Brockman responded: 'Solving for the mission has always been my primary motivation. It remains so today.'
Molo then displayed pages from Brockman's electronic journal. A 2017 entry read, 'Financially what will take me to $1B?' A November 2017 entry, written while Brockman weighed pursuing a for-profit without Musk, read: 'it'd be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that'd be pretty morally bankrupt.' Brockman told the jury he meant the move 'would actually serve the mission, but it'd be hard to look at yourself in the mirror.' Molo also pointed to Brockman's stakes in OpenAI counterparties including Cerebras, CoreWeave and Helion Energy.
Shivon Zilis, who joined OpenAI's board in 2020 and left in 2023, took the stand after Brockman's two days of testimony. OpenAI lawyer Sarah Eddy used Zilis to develop the company's argument that Musk's suit is competitive, not principled. Zilis said she met Musk while at OpenAI in 2016, joined Tesla and Neuralink in 2017, and has four children with Musk via IVF. She did not disclose the relationship to OpenAI until Business Insider reported it in 2022.
Eddy displayed an FAQ document Zilis drafted for a Tesla event at the 2017 NeurIPS conference: 'The purpose of this event is to share that Tesla is building a world leading AI lab(?) which will rival the likes of Google/DeepMind and Facebook AI Research.' Zilis testified that Musk, while still on OpenAI's board, tried to recruit Altman to lead that lab and asked Andrej Karpathy 'to send a list of top OpenAI people to poach.' In an email shown in court, Musk wrote: 'There is little chance of OpenAI being a serious force if I focus on TeslaAI.'
Video depositions from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and former board member Helen Toner also played this week, both addressing Altman's brief 2023 ouster. We covered Murati's deposition and the 78 text messages around that firing in earlier reporting. Murati's texts with Altman from November 2023, entered as evidence, show Altman attempting to understand the board's actions and regain control.
Brockman also disclosed that two days before trial, Musk texted him to ask about settling. When Brockman suggested both sides drop their claims, Musk replied: 'By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.'
Several questions remain unresolved by the testimony so far. Brockman's journal entries are genuinely awkward for OpenAI, and the network of Altman- and Brockman-adjacent investments in OpenAI counterparties is a real conflict-of-interest exposure regardless of how the jury reads the 2017 negotiations. Musk's side has not yet had to reconcile the Tesla AI lab plan with his sworn position that he was duped into funding a nonprofit. Both narratives can be partly true.
The market consequence is the part that matters beyond the courtroom. A verdict that forces unwinding OpenAI's 2025 conversion to a public benefit corporation, or removes Altman, would land directly on a roughly $1 trillion IPO process and on Microsoft's commercial relationship with the company. A defense win clears the runway. Either way, the discovery already produced — Brockman's journal, the Tesla FAQ, the Musk-Karpathy poaching texts — is now part of the permanent record of how the modern AI industry was built, and it will be cited in every governance fight at every frontier lab for years.
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