In late August 2017, key players at OpenAI (then a small nonprofit institute) met to discuss how to create a for-profit entity to commercialize the technology and raise the funding needed to make AGI a reality.
Elon Musk wanted complete control of the company and had just given each of his co-founders a Tesla Model 3. Chief Technology Officer Greg Brockman said he thought this was a way to comfort Musk and Sam Altman at a time when they were competing to win support for their respective visions for the company’s future. OpenAI’s head of research, Ilya Satskeva, had commissioned a drawing of a Tesla to give to Musk during the meeting as a goodwill gesture.
The conversation didn’t go that way. Brockman said he became angry and upset when he was told that other companies would not respond to Musk’s request for control of the company. He sat for a few minutes and thought quietly.
Then, when Brockman told him, Musk answered, “No.” The SpaceX and Tesla founder “got up and stormed around the table…I thought he was going to hit me. He grabbed the painting and started running out of the room. Then he turned around and said, ‘When are you leaving OpenAI?'”
Mr. Brockman and Mr. Sutskever did not depart from or commit to Mr. Musk’s vision. Musk has stopped making regular contributions to the company’s operating budget and will resign from the company’s board within six months, but he paid for the office space the company shared with Neuralink until 2020.
Amid today’s legal battle over OpenAI’s future, scrutiny settled on a critical moment in 2017, when the original co-founders disagreed over who would control the future of the organization, ultimately leading to Musk filing a lawsuit against the co-founders.
Although we have yet to hear from Sam Altman, OpenAI President Greg Brockman testified for two days, often referencing his personal journal that provides valuable insight into what it’s like to be a 30-year-old tech executive in a heated battle with Elon Musk.
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Brockman called the magazine’s publicity “extremely painful” and said the magazine was “a very personal piece of writing that was never intended for the world to see.[But]there’s nothing in it that I’m ashamed of.”
Intense negotiations between startup founders are rarely shared so publicly, especially when it comes to a world-changing company like OpenAI.
We got a recent taste of this rancor when an OpenAI lawyer shared a text message that Musk sent to Brockman two days before the trial began: “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, you will be.”
The jury never saw the memo, but Musk’s lawyers did their best to understand its spirit. They are trying to prove in court that Altman and Brockman “stole charity,” while OpenAI’s legal team is trying to prove that Musk had the exact same plan in mind.
The event that started all of this was when an OpenAI model defeated top human players in the video game DOTA II. Brockman said everyone at the organization was convinced that computing was a critical resource for creating powerful AI tools, but that purely nonprofit funding alone was not enough.
That led to talk of a commercial subsidiary, and Mr. Musk, at least initially, wanted “unambiguous” control. Other founders offered comparable equity, and perhaps more equity to match their cash investment. Another idea on the table was to somehow connect OpenAI to Tesla’s AI work. There were more than 20 variations on the plan, said Sivon Gillis, an OpenAI advisor who acted as a go-between for Musk and the team.
But their partnership fell apart when the other founders refused to give Musk control.
“There should not be one person who has complete and absolute control over OpenAI,” Brockman testified. Brockman and Sutskever discussed plans to oust Elon from OpenAI’s board in order to move forward, which led to the discovery of a November 2017 diary entry that caught the attention of Musk’s lawyers.
“I can’t imagine turning this into a commercial venture without a very nasty dispute,” Brockman wrote. And I think his story is right that we ultimately weren’t being honest with him about wanting to still do the for-profit thing without him…By the way, the other takeaway from this is that it’s wrong to steal the nonprofit from him. I’ll be turning into a B-corp without him. That would be pretty morally bankrupt. And he’s really not stupid. ”
“Stealing a nonprofit” may seem like a terrible phrase, but Brockman says the idea behind it was whether to remove Musk from the board. They ultimately didn’t do it. Musk personally stepped down from the company’s board in February 2018, concluding that “OpenAI is definitely on a path to failure,” and said he would focus more on AI at Tesla.
Brockman described his reflections as an effort to determine whether he was satisfied with his work life.
“This is our only chance to get out of Elon,” he wrote during the meeting. “Is he the ‘brilliant leader’ that I would choose? We really have a chance to make this happen. Economically, what would take me to $1 billion?”
That final remorse was also taken by Mr. Musk’s lawyers as a sign that Mr. Brockman is more concerned about his personal wealth than the nonprofit’s mission. Brockman said the company’s current stock holdings are worth about $30 billion, which gave Musk’s chief trial lawyer Steve Moro an opportunity to reprimand him.
“Why didn’t you take $29 billion, more than the $1 billion you said was good, and give it to charity?” Moro demanded.
“Look what we accomplished,” Brockman replied. “The OpenAI nonprofit has over $150 billion in OpenAI equity value, which we have built through blood, sweat, and tears since Elon left.”
Moro also detailed an email in which Brockman said he would donate $100,000 to OpenAI. Ironically, Brockman may be best known to the public for donating $25 million, the largest contribution of the 2025 political cycle, to MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting President Donald Trump, but that was not brought up in court.
Mr. Moro said Mr. Musk was “mean” toward Brockman, ridiculed Mr. Brockman’s account of the whistleblower meeting over control of the company, and suggested that he did not understand governance issues like the serial founder.
But Brockman said Musk doesn’t understand AI. “He didn’t know about AI, and he doesn’t know it,” he testified, explaining that Musk rejected an early demo of the software that would become ChatGPT. “We just didn’t think he would take the time he needed to really get better.”
“The fact that Elon looked at a very early version of this research and didn’t recognize that spark that was actually driving all this stuff, (and) that was exactly the kind of thing that was important to avoid happening in this environment,” Brockman said.
In 2019, OpenAI formed a for-profit company that it planned to use to raise $1 billion from Microsoft. The company will raise an additional $13 billion from the software giant over the next four years, strengthening its position as a leading AI frontier lab. It also increased the net worth of the company’s executives and employees, as well as assets held by OpenAI, a nonprofit organization.
Ultimately, these deals fueled Musk’s suspicions that Altman and Brockman had outbid him, leading him to file a lawsuit in 2024. The trial is expected to continue into next week.
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