★ On The Stand! ★
Sam Testifies. Elon: "pass it to my children."
Altman's 14 kids vs. the non-profit charter.
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Courtroom Dispatch · Oakland · Weeks 1–3
$38 Million
Scorned.
He wrote the founding check. They built it without him. Now he wants $134 billion and Sam's job.
OAKLAND — It started, as these things do, with a dinner and a dream. It is ending, as these things do, in federal court.
Eleven years after he wrote the founding check, Elon Musk took the stand and called himself a fool for ever funding OpenAI. "I actually was a fool," he told the court on 30 April. "I literally was. I gave them $38 million of essentially free funding which they then used to create an $800 billion for-profit company." The remark — delivered to a jury, under oath, on the third day of his own testimony — was so candid that even his own lawyers, per courtroom observers, appeared briefly unsure where to put their faces.
The math, for those just tuning in: Musk donated roughly $38 million in OpenAI's non-profit years (2015–2017). He is now seeking as much as $134 billion in damages, the removal of CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, and a forced reversion to the original non-profit charter. OpenAI calls the suit "baseless." Compute! has reviewed the description and finds it, regrettably, accurate.
Then came Week 2 — and the trial's most cinematic set piece. Greg Brockman testified that in August 2017, he and co-founder Ilya Sutskever met with Musk to discuss OpenAI's future. Sutskever had brought Musk a Tesla-related painting as a gift. The meeting opened warmly. It did not stay that way.
When Brockman and Sutskever rejected Musk's demand for majority control, Musk — per Brockman's sworn testimony — got up and walked toward him. "I thought he was going to hit me," Brockman told the court. "I thought he was going to physically attack me."
"I thought he was going to hit me."
— Greg Brockman, sworn · on Musk, August 2017
Musk then, allegedly, told Brockman: "When will you be departing OpenAI? I will withhold funding until you decide what you are going to do," grabbed Sutskever's painting off the table, and stormed out of the room.
Then, on Tuesday, the missing witness finally took the stand. Sam Altman, testifying under cross-examination, described what he called a "hair-raising" 2017 conversation in which OpenAI's co-founders asked Musk what would happen to the company if Musk had majority control and then died. "I haven't thought about it a ton," Musk replied, per Altman's sworn account. "Maybe I should pass it to my children." The non-profit's original mission, Altman testified, was specifically to prevent AGI from being controlled "by any one person, no matter how good their intents are." It was not, on the record, designed to be inherited by fourteen.
The trial's other plot twist arrived by video. Helen Toner — the former OpenAI board member who voted to fire Altman in November 2023 — described Mira Murati in deposition as "strikingly unsupportive, remarkably passive." Murati, Toner testified, "was waiting to see which way the wind would blow. She didn't realize that she was the wind." Murati's "directionally very bad" text — the one that made her, briefly, the trial's most sympathetic witness — is now in evidence. So is Toner's reading of what happened in the room around it.
Closing arguments wrapped this week. The verdict is pending. The painting remains, presumably, in storage.
