In the wake of Sam Altman’s testimony in the ongoing trial of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, a clearer picture has emerged about how Musk could have run the company differently. Musk, a non-profit co-founder of OpenAI, has sued the company, its CEO Altman, and its president, Greg Brockman, for “charity theft.” He is seeking to return the now $852 billion AI company to its original nonprofit structure and is also seeking damages of up to $180 billion to shift it from OpenAI’s for-profit arm to its nonprofit parent company.
In his statement yesterday (May 12), Altman described Musk as a “mercurial” leader, saying he felt like Musk had abandoned us, not kept his promises, put the company in a very difficult place, and jeopardized the mission. [and] He didn’t really care about the things I thought he did.
Musk invested $44 million in OpenAI over five years before stepping down from its board in 2018 after a power struggle. He has not been involved with the company since then.
Despite Musk’s stated desire to keep OpenAI a nonprofit, Altman testified that Musk repeatedly sought to take control of the organization. In 2017, Musk allegedly proposed merging OpenAI with Tesla, a for-profit company, a move Altman opposed due to their conflicting missions. According to Altman, Musk believes the merger will create a stronger competitor to Google.
Altman also claimed that Musk initially requested a 90 percent stake in OpenAI. “It softened after that, but it was always a majority,” he testified.
He also recounted what he described as a “particularly troubling moment,” when the founders asked Musk what would happen to OpenAI if he took control and then died. Musk allegedly responded that control should pass to his children. Altman’s legal team has used such claims to portray Musk as seeking too much control.
For his part, Musk testified last week that his concerns about OpenAI intensified after Microsoft’s first $10 billion investment in 2022, which he described as a for-profit “bait and switch.” Microsoft would only make such a large investment if it expected financial returns, he said, adding that this would give Microsoft effective control over artificial general intelligence, technology he believes was originally intended to remain under a nonprofit structure.
Today, OpenAI is owned by… Spread across several key stakeholders: Its nonprofit owns about 26 percent, Microsoft owns nearly 27 percent, and current and former employees combined own another 26 percent, with smaller stakes owned by venture capital firms.
While Musk argued that OpenAI should have remained a nonprofit, Altman’s testimony offers a different narrative, one in which Musk sought majority control and was not willing to rule out future dominance of the organization. Musk said “He was unwilling to commit in writing that he would not have long-term control.”
Meanwhile, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, which was founded in March 2023, operates as a for-profit entity and is valued at $250 billion, or up to $1.25 trillion when considered alongside SpaceX.
Altman’s credibility also came under scrutiny during the trial. Musk’s lead lawyer, Stephen Mollo, asked him directly: “Are you completely trustworthy?”
Previous testimony from other witnesses added to the complexity of the case. These include OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Musk himself. Sutskever, who led Altman’s brief ouster in November 2023, had previously described him as someone who “displays a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his executives, and pitting his executives against each other.” This week saw him begin gathering evidence of what he saw as Altman’s betrayal in the year before the 2023 ouster, although he later reversed course and backed Altman’s return. Former CTO Mira Moratti also testified that Altman was prone to “creating chaos.”
