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The Musk v. Altman trial has entered it in Oakland, California. It's the culmination of a 2024 lawsuit in which Elon Musk accuses OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of converting a charity he helped fund into a private goldmine.
The case could force OpenAI to unwind its for-profit restructuring, strip Microsoft's licensing rights, and remove Altman from his role. A nine-person jury will deliver an advisory verdict guiding Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers's decision.
What went down
Musk testified for three days, repeatedly accusing Altman and Brockman of trying to "steal a charity."
Brockman took the stand on Monday and disclosed his OpenAI stake is now worth nearly $30 billion.
Musk's lawyer mentioned the $30bn figure more than a dozen times, asking how it squared with OpenAI's mission.
A 2017 Brockman journal entry, "Financially, what will take me to $1B?" was read into evidence.
OpenAI revealed Musk texted Brockman two days before trial proposing settlement, then warning he and Altman would be "the most hated men in America."
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Why does this matter?
This isn't just a billionaire grudge match. The remedies Musk is seeking; unwinding OpenAI's for-profit conversion, voiding the Microsoft deal, removing Altman, would reshape the company that triggered the current AI boom and unsettle every investor who has since poured money into the sector.
The trial is also putting AI safety arguments in front of a jury for the first time. Witnesses including Berkeley's Stuart Russell, Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati and Satya Nadella are expected to testify on what OpenAI promised, what it became, and whether its founders enriched themselves while claiming a charitable mission.
Our take
The settlement text is a curveball. If Musk genuinely believed OpenAI had betrayed humanity, the offer to drop the case in exchange for unspecified terms looks less like a principled stand and more like leverage. OpenAI's lawyers are framing it exactly that way. A competitor (xAI, now merged with SpaceX at a $250 billion valuation) using charitable trust law to kneecap a rival.
But Brockman's $30 billion stake, set against a journal entry openly asking how to reach his first billion, is really quite something. The defence, that compensation was "secondary to the mission", may be technically true and still feel hollow to a jury. Whatever the verdict, the trial is doing something the AI industry has spent years avoiding: forcing its founders to explain, under oath, what they actually promised and what they actually built.
Another big thing… OpenAI misses its own targets, the market reacts
A Wall Street Journal report last week revealed OpenAI has missed internal targets for both weekly active users and monthly revenue, sparking concern over whether the company can support its $600bn data centre commitments. Stocks fell shortly after the news broke Oracle dropped 4%, Broadcom 4%, AMD 3%, Nvidia over 1%, and SoftBank sank around 10%.
OpenAI only just closed a $122bn funding round at an $852bn valuation, and is targeting an IPO by year-end. Meanwhile Anthropic surged past a $1 trillion valuation on secondary markets, with Citigroup now forecasting it will overtake OpenAI as the leader of the AI market by 2030.
