Musk Altman trial: Inside the OpenAI legal showdown

Elon Musk told a San Francisco jury this week that he donated $38 million to OpenAI under the belief that it would remain a nonprofit research lab, one where no single person, including himself, would ever own stock. That bet, he says, has cost him dearly.

Jury selection in Musk vs Altman began Monday, and Musk took the stand the following day as the trial's first witness. His central accusation is that CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman deceived him into funding what ultimately became an $800 billion for-profit company.

"I was a fool who provided free funding," Musk told the court. He is seeking the removal of both Altman and Brockman, up to $150 billion in damages for OpenAI's nonprofit arm, and an end to the company's status as a public benefit corporation.

Musk described donating roughly $5 million per quarter and covering $3 million annually in office rent, continuing even after growing uneasy about OpenAI's direction. "After I received reassurances that OpenAI would continue to be a nonprofit, I continued to donate," he testified.

He says he only concluded the deal had been broken in late 2022, the same period OpenAI's valuation was surging on the back of ChatGPT's explosive growth. A key exhibit shown to the jury: an email from co-founder Ilya Sutskever raising concerns that Musk's proposed ownership structure would give him unilateral control over AGI.

OpenAI has pushed back sharply, calling the lawsuit "a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor" and pointing to Musk's own AI ventures, including xAI and its ChatGPT rival Grok, as the real motivation. The company argues that Musk himself once sought majority ownership of OpenAI and departed after that was refused.

On the Microsoft investment an early flashpoint Musk testified he initially accepted it, understanding it was structured to put the nonprofit's interests first and would "dissolve upon the discovery of AGI."

The outcome could reshape how OpenAI is allowed to operate and whether its ongoing conversion from nonprofit to a fully for-profit structure can continue.