This morning, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman finally took the stand in his defense against former co-founder Elon Musk’s lawsuit challenging OpenAI’s corporate structure.
Altman was immediately asked what he thought about Musk’s claim that OpenAI’s other founders “stole philanthropy” when they launched a for-profit subsidiary to sell products based on the company’s AI models.
After a few seconds of silence, Altman said, “I find it difficult to even wrap my head around that framework.” “We have created one of the world’s largest charities. This foundation is doing great work and will do even more.”
Musk’s lawyers have been at pains to point out that the OpenAI Foundation, now worth $200 billion, had no full-time staff until earlier this year. OpenAI Board Chairman Brett Taylor testified today that the reason is simply the challenge of converting OpenAI stock into cash, which was accomplished in the organization’s latest restructuring in 2025.
A central question posed by Musk’s lawyers is whether the company’s commitment to safety has been left behind as its commercial power grows. But Altman said that in 2017, at a critical time when the founders were struggling to figure out how to get funding to power their AI models, Musk’s “specific plans for safety made me concerned.”
He was asked what would happen if Musk died while managing a commercial virtual OpenAI, which he said was a “particularly chilling moment” during the discussion. During Altman’s talk, Musk said, “OpenAI may be passed down to my children.”
Altman said Musk’s focus on control of his first commercial company stopped him because OpenAI was focused on keeping advanced AI out of the hands of a single person, and from his experience running Y Combinator, a prominent startup accelerator, he knew that “founders who have control don’t typically give it up.”
Altman also testified that while Musk’s business strategy may have worked in engineering and manufacturing, it didn’t work with OpenAI.
“I don’t think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good lab,” Altman said. “He was demotivating some of our most important researchers. At one point, he asked Greg and Elijah to create a list of researchers, list their accomplishments, stack them up and rank them, and chain-saw the population. It did great long-term damage to the culture of the organization.”
In fact, Altman is defending the “sweat equity” of fellow co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskeva. The pair effectively ran OpenAI at the time while Musk and Altman worked on other jobs.
After this conflict was not resolved, Musk ultimately left OpenAI’s board and began competing AI efforts with Tesla with his own AI startup, xAI. But Altman kept in touch with the fickle businessman, updating him on OpenAI’s efforts and asking for funding and advice.
OpenAI’s lawyers pointed out that Musk was asked to stay informed and participate in investments that the lawsuit now claims corrupted the nonprofit.
During a discussion about Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in 2018, Altman said, “Unlike a lot of my meetings with Mr. Musk, this was a good atmosphere meeting,” where Mr. Musk had a “long conversation showing me memes on his phone.”
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