Friendship breakups are never easy, but few are as complicated and costly as the collapse of Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s once-thriving tech bromance.
On Thursday, closing arguments concluded in Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, leaving a jury to deliberate next week whether Altman and other executives “stole a charity” (as one of Musk’s lawyers put it) by turning much of what was once a nonprofit research lab into a corporate behemoth. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) For three weeks, lawyers on both sides have deployed an increasingly unhinged body of evidence in an attempt to discredit both men and prove that they are untrustworthy and power-hungry.
If the jury rules that Musk was misled into donating approximately $38 million to OpenAI under false pretenses, then Judge Yvonne González Rogers will decide on damages, which could potentially lead to $150 billion in financial restitution and, while unlikely, could also include major changes to OpenAI’s leadership and governance structure. However, even if the jury does not rule in Musk’s favor, the evidence presented at trial may be enough to convince state regulators to review the agreements that allowed OpenAI to restructure into a for-profit company to begin with.
Lawyers tell me whoever loses will likely appeal, meaning the fight may not be over yet. But for now, here are five important revelations from the trial.
OpenAI board members questioned Sam Altman’s honesty
Musk’s legal team sought to portray Altman as deeply untrustworthy, prone to lying to his co-founders, employees and board members if it meant promoting his interests.
Several former OpenAI employees and board members resigned in the courtroom. Altman’s “pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor” led directly to his temporary removal as CEO in 2023, Helen Toner, a former board member, said in a video statement. He had a tendency to “say one thing to one person and the opposite to another,” said Mira Murati, former chief technology officer at OpenAI. In one case, he said, Altman explicitly lied to him about the security review required to examine a new AI model.
Greg Brockman Kept a Diary and Probably Wishes He Hadn’t
Some of the most salacious evidence presented at trial came from a personal diary kept by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who recounted his “stream of consciousness” as he weighed whether it would be “morally bankrupt” to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company.
“I can’t imagine us turning this into a for-profit organization without a very nasty fight,” he wrote in a 2017 entry. “It would be a mistake to steal the nonprofit away,” referring to Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and provided most of its initial funding. “He’s not really an idiot,” Brockman later wrote. “His story will be correct: in the end we were not honest with him.”
Brockman was also candid about his personal ambitions; “It would be nice to make billions,” he wrote. He later received a stake in OpenAI whose value is now estimated at around $30 billion.
Surprise, surprise: it is difficult to collaborate with Elon Musk
OpenAI created a bot in 2017 that was so advanced that it could beat top professional players in the multiplayer strategic battle game Dota 2, a major milestone for the fledgling lab. “It’s time to take the next step for OpenAI. This is the trigger event,” Musk emailed Brockman.
Musk gave Brockman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever new Tesla Model 3 cars, presumably to “smear us,” Brockman said. The Tesla CEO then summoned them to his self-described “haunted mansion” to discuss a possible for-profit arm of OpenAI, where Musk’s then-girlfriend Amber Heard served whiskey.
At one point, Musk became so enraged at his guests’ insistence on sharing control of OpenAI, rather than ceding absolute control, that “I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me,” Brockman said. In the following months, Musk repeatedly proposed that Tesla absorb OpenAI and Altman simultaneously. And, in a “particularly creepy moment,” he mused that OpenAI should be passed down to his children.
Musk eventually left OpenAI in 2018 to start building his own competitor. During an all-hands meeting, Musk had another tense verbal fight with Josh Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, over the race to develop artificial general intelligence. “He snapped and called me an idiot,” Achiam responded. For Achiam’s bravery, two OpenAI employees, including Dario Amodei, who later left to form Anthropic, awarded him a small golden statue of a donkey’s butt, with the message “Never stop being an idiot for safety.”
Microsoft approached OpenAI to not be left behind in the AI race
Musk first funded OpenAI because of another friendship breakdown, this one with Google co-founder Larry Page, who Musk says mocked him at his own birthday party for preferring humans to computers. Microsoft, named in Musk’s lawsuit for aiding and abetting OpenAI’s abandonment of its nonprofit mission, later became OpenAI’s first major corporate investor in 2019, because it also wanted to compete with Google as the AI race heated up.
“I don’t want to be IBM,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote to executives, referring to that company’s decline in the personal computing race, according to emails revealed at trial. “It was becoming even more central and important that we have real agency in every layer of the whole,” Nadella added.
That meant ingratiating himself in all corners of the OpenAI world. Microsoft played a crucial role in returning Altman to power after the board’s failed coup in 2023, which Nadella referred to as “amateur town, as far as I’m concerned.” In a text thread revealed at trial, Altman asked Microsoft executives to examine several members of OpenAI’s reconstituted board of directors, who now control both the for-profit company and the original nonprofit.
This summer, Microsoft will have invested more than $100 billion in OpenAI, said one of the company’s executives. Last fall, the company took a 27 percent stake in OpenAI.
Everyone wants to rule the world (or artificial general intelligence)
Microsoft. Musk. Altman. Brockman. Almost everyone at the trial pointed the finger at a different bogeyman whose motives were too impure and whose character was too corruptible to be trusted with control of what they all agreed would be an extremely momentous technology. On the contrary, his own introspection took a backseat to ambition.
“We don’t want to have a terminator result,” Musk agreed, under apparent glare from Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who tried, and sometimes failed, to divert judgment from discussions about the existential risks of AI. “If you have someone who is not trustworthy in charge of AI,” Musk said, “I think that is a very big danger to the entire world.”
More than a decade ago, Musk joined forces with OpenAI’s co-founders to create a charity equipped to confront a different threat then poised to lead the AI race: Google, which had recently acquired DeepMind from Demis Hassabis. Now, like Altman and Brockman, who claimed they resisted Musk’s dictatorial attempts to ensure absolute control of artificial general intelligence, Musk presented himself as someone selfless and transparent enough to be put in charge.
“It is ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that is in the exact space,” González Rogers told Musk’s lawyer at one point, referring to xAI, which has been criticized this year for facilitating the mass creation of non-consensual deepfakes. “I suspect there are many people who would not like to put the future of humanity in the hands of Mr. Musk.”