Link copied Elon Musk departs the Phillip Burton Federal Building and United States Courthouse in San Francisco on Jan. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/ Benjamin Fanjoy, File) OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) — A jury trial pitting two tech billionaires against each other in a feud for the future of one of the highest valued artificial intelligence companies in the world proceeded Tuesday in an Oakland federal courtroom with OpenAI’s president’s continued testimony. Greg Brockman, the current president and a co-founder of OpenAI, testified about several email chains and text messages with co-founder Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about restructuring the company from a nonprofit with a mission that stated its only “fiduciary duty was for the benefit of humanity” to something that included a for-profit entity. In August 2017, after OpenAI’s AI model won a video game against the best human player in the world, Brockman said Musk was ready to discuss a for-profit arm of OpenAI. In order to compete with other large AI companies such as Google, Brockman explained, OpenAI needed more computing power, and was likely only to get it through investors guaranteed a return with a for-profit subsidiary. Brockman’s personal diary provided insight during his testimony, including one entry in the second half of 2017 saying he didn’t want Musk to have overriding control of the fledging for-profit company, one of the conditions Musk demanded if he was going to continue funding the nonprofit. “Definitely not unilateral control, no person should have control over what we’re creating and what’s fair is an equal split, and we can’t agree to anything less than that,” Brockman said in his journal. While questioned by OpenAI counsel Sarah Eddy, Brockman said he and OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever were concerned about Musk’s conditions for control of the for-profit, not just because of OpenAI’s mission, he said, but because they didn’t think Musk was the right person for the job. “Look, he knows rockets, he knows electric cars,” Brockman said of Musk. “He did not and does not know AI.” After declining Musk’s proposal in which Musk would have an initial 62.5% of the for-profit arm, with the other co-founders’ shares at 6.25% — with an option for Altman to invest an additional 6.25% — Brockman said Musk became angry and upset and did not agree to a counterproposal of equal shares. In emails, Brockman made clear his ongoing concerns, reading them to the nine-person jury. “[The] goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship,” he said in an email to Musk. “[It’s a] bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you choose to be.” By early 2018, an agreement between the OpenAI co-founders didn’t occur and Musk resigned from the company’s board but continued paying rent payments for an office space in San Francisco through 2020. Musk founded his own for-profit AI company, xAI, in 2023. During cross-examination, Musk’s lead counsel, Steven Molo, raised his voice several times as Brockman jockeyed answering a question directly. Molo asked Brockman if he understood what it meant to be on the board of OpenAI, and the process of adding more board members, attempting to show that Musk never wanted sole control of the for-profit arm as the company grew. Musk, the world’s richest person, brings breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment claims against Altman and Brockman stemming from a 2024 lawsuit and seeks $150 billion in compensatory and punitive damages from OpenAI and Microsoft over violating its original mission. Musk, Altman, Brockman and Sutskever co-founded OpenAI in 2015. Microsoft is a co-defendant in the case over a claim of aiding and abetting the breach of charitable trust, with Musk claiming the company benefited from his early donations. Altman partnered with Microsoft in 2019 after the software company agreed to invest $1 billion and later made another $10 billion investment in its for-profit arm. OpenAI’s for-profit is currently valued at $840 billion, with Microsoft’s 27% stake in the for-profit valued at around $200 billion. A video featuring deposition testimony from Robert Wu, OpenAI’s deputy corporate secretary and general counsel, was played for the courtroom near the end of the court day, with Wu mostly going documents pertaining to its initial partnership and subsequent deals with Microsoft and OpenAI’s move to a Delaware limited liability company in Jan. 23, 2023, under the name OpenAI Global LLC. OpenAI eventually converted the LLC into a corporate stock structure for-profit in October 2025. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a Barack Obama appointee, tried to bring some levity to the proceedings early in the day, telling the jury she brought homemade tamales in honor of Cinco de Mayo. Categories /