Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, seeking $134 billion in damages, began jury selection in Oakland, with Musk, Altman, Nadella, and Murati expected to testify about the company's shift from nonprofit to capped profit structure. Internal documents including Greg Brockman's 2017…
In a December 2015 email, Sam Altman told Elon Musk they had no financial strings attached and could focus entirely on AI's benefit to humanity. Nine years later, in a courthouse in Oakland, Altman will have to answer for what happened to that promise. Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI began jury selection on Monday in the Ronald V. Dellums U.S. Courthouse. AP News reports that Musk, Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and former OpenAI technical director Mira Murati are all expected to testify. At stake: $134 billion in damages that Musk wants directed to the nonprofit arm he helped found with a $38 million investment between 2015 and 2017. AP News also reports that OpenAI is now valued at $852 billion and preparing for a public listing that could reach $1 trillion. The spectacle is real. The testimony will be colorful. But the document that matters most to this case was written before any of the witnesses took the stand. Court filings already unsealed include diary entries from OpenAI president Greg Brockman that document, in his own words, what the founding team was thinking at the time it matters most. Big Technology reports that in the fall of 2017, Brockman wrote: "This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon." The company he was trying to escape was the one Musk had just helped fund. Reuters reports that in the same entry, Brockman posed the financial question that would define the next decade: "Financially, what will take me to $1B? Accepting Elon's terms nukes two things: our ability to choose and the economics." That tension between mission and money is the entire case. Musk argues that OpenAI's 2019 restructuring, which created a capped-profit entity and allowed billions in Microsoft investment, betrayed the founding agreement that the company would remain nonprofit and focused on human benefit. OpenAI disputes this. The Guardian reports that the judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, has called the main claim a toss-up based on what she has seen so far. The Altman email from 2015 predates the dispute by years. Big Technology reports that Altman wrote: "Because we don't have any financial obligations, we can focus on maximal positive human impact." The company that statement described no longer exists. By 2019, OpenAI had accepted financial obligations that reshaped its structure, its board, and its competitive landscape. Reuters reports that Musk's January 2018 internal email, written after he had left the board following a failed attempt to take over as CEO, captured his view at the time: "OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google." The path OpenAI actually took led to ChatGPT, $852 billion in valuation, and a potential IPO. What the unsealed filings show is that the people inside OpenAI knew exactly what they were doing. The pivot to profit was not a gradual drift or an unintended consequence of scale. Brockman's diary entries, written as the decisions were being made, show internal awareness that the nonprofit mission was being traded against financial and organizational survival. The irony that Musk's damage award would flow back to the nonprofit he originally funded appears to have occurred to no one in the filings currently public. The trial testimony beginning this week will add the layer the filings cannot: what these people say under oath, in real time, when pressed on inconsistencies between what they wrote and what they built. Big Technology reports that Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist, reportedly told a deposition that he has not spoken to Altman in over a year as of the trial prep phase. His absence from the witness list may say as much as his testimony would. Whether any of this meets the legal threshold for breach of fiduciary duty is for the court to decide. What the record already shows is that the moral case is messier than either side admits. Musk funded a nonprofit, left its board, tried to take it over, and is now suing for $134 billion that would restore the nonprofit structure. Business Insider reports that Altman built the company that money built. Nadella managed the investment that made both possible. Murati briefly held the top job after Altman was briefly fired in 2023 and then reinstalled. The witness list is a map of a decade of internal conflict that the public is only now seeing in the words the participants wrote when they thought no one was watching.