During the first week of the historic lawsuit between Elon Musk and OpenAI, the billionaire testified in court with a formal appearance and revealed that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman misled him into providing funding for the company. In his testimony, he warned that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity and admitted that he had recruited OpenAI employees for his own businesses. He also confessed—drawing gasps in the courtroom—that his company xAI (maker of Grok) uses OpenAI’s models to train its own systems.
The federal courthouse in Oakland was packed with lawyers, journalists, and OpenAI employees, while outside, protesters called for a boycott of ChatGPT and Tesla. Musk appeared calm and somewhat remorseful, stating: “I was naive to give them free funding to start a startup.” He claimed that when he co-founded OpenAI in 2015, he believed he was supporting a nonprofit organization for the common good, not one that would later become a company valued at $800 billion.
Musk is asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their positions and to reverse the restructuring that allowed OpenAI to operate a for-profit subsidiary. The ruling could affect OpenAI’s public offering, while Musk’s own xAI plans to go public in June with a target valuation of $1.75 trillion.
The core issue of the trial revolves around Musk’s true motivations for the lawsuit. Musk argues that he seeks to restore OpenAI’s original mission of AI safety. In contrast, OpenAI’s attorney, William Savitt, contends that Musk never truly committed to the nonprofit model and is now suing to harm a competitor.
Musk portrayed himself as a longtime advocate for AI safety, claiming he co-founded OpenAI to counter Google and warning of a possible “Terminator” scenario. Savitt, however, contradicted him by pointing out that xAI sued Colorado over an anti-algorithmic-bias law. Judge Yvonne González Rogers intervened sarcastically: “Many people wouldn’t want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands.”
Regarding the timeline, Musk explained that his distrust of Altman grew in three phases, and that the breaking point came when Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI in 2022. In his view, that proved they were only seeking enormous profits.
Savitt, for his part, suggested that Musk simply wants to eliminate competition. He presented emails where Musk recruited OpenAI staff for Tesla and Neuralink, and noted that xAI is also a for-profit, closed-source company. Musk denied being a direct competitor and acknowledged that xAI partially distills OpenAI’s models—a practice other companies (including OpenAI itself) have criticized, for example against DeepSeek or Anthropic. Musk defended the technique as “standard” for validating AI systems.
Testifying next week will be AI safety expert Stuart Russell and Greg Brockman himself.