The first day of testimony in the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman offered two strikingly different stories about how OpenAI evolved from a nonprofit artificial intelligence lab to one of the world’s most influential technology companies.
According to Mr. Musk, the move to OpenAI was one of the biggest heists in history — a nonprofit ripped from its promise of altruism by the greed of Mr. Altman, who founded OpenAI with Mr. Musk and a group of AI researchers more than 10 years ago. In OpenAI’s narrative of these early days, however, it was Mr. Musk who was the voracious capitalist. And when the other founders of the lab refused to agree to his plans, he left angry.
“This lawsuit is very simple: It’s not OK to steal from charity,” Musk said on the witness stand in an Oakland, California, courtroom on Tuesday. If Mr. Altman and OpenAI are allowed to go ahead with their plans, he added, “It will give license to loot every charity in America.”
A nine-member jury, empaneled a day earlier in federal court by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, will hear from tech moguls, former OpenAI board members and employees in what is expected to be a month-long trial. The jurors’ decision could shift the balance of power between the AI companies, with Mr. Musk seeking $150 billion in damages and the order that OpenAI, now worth about $730 billion, will disrupt its profit plans.
The trial pitting the world’s richest man against a pioneer of the tech industry’s artificial intelligence boom drew protesters and heightened security to the normally quiet streets of downtown Oakland.
Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman were each ushered through a private entrance to the Ronald V. Dellums U.S. Courthouse as a line of lawyers and reporters waited to enter. Security has become a bigger concern after a man believed to be angry at AI was recently arrested after authorities said he threw a firebomb at Mr. Altman’s home in San Francisco.
In the courtroom, it was clear that the dispute between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman had become deeply personal. As Judge Gonzalez Rogers took a short break Monday before welcoming prospective jurors, Mr. Altman turned to a New York Times reporter and said: “I hope you enjoy it.” And before the lawyers made opening statements on Tuesday, the judge admonished Mr. Musk over his prolific social media posts targeting OpenAI and deriding Mr. Altman as an “Altman fraud.”
“How can we do this without you making it worse outside the courtroom?” she asked. Mr Musk said he was just responding to things OpenAI said online. The judge asked him – and Mr Altman – to start with a “clean slate” and “keep things to a minimum” on social media. They agreed.
In his opening statement, Mr. Musk’s general counsel, Steven Molo, accused Mr. Altman and his fellow OpenAI executives of “stealing charity.”
After Mr. Musk helped set up OpenAI as a nonprofit, Mr. Molo said, Mr. Altman and others were unjustly enriched by turning the charity into a money-making enterprise. He compared today’s OpenAI to a museum shop that has taken over the museum. “The museum shop cannot rob the muse, steal all the Picassos and use them for profit,” he told the jury.
William Savitt, OpenAI’s general counsel, said in his opening statement that these were “sour grapes.”
“We’re here because Musk didn’t make it in OpenAI,” he said. “My clients had the courage to continue and succeed without him. Mr. Musk didn’t like that.”
Lawyers for OpenAI (as well as a lawyer from Microsoft, an OpenAI investor and partner who was also named in the lawsuit) argued that Mr. Musk didn’t seem to care much for OpenAI after his departure in 2018. When Microsoft invested $1 billion in the lab a year later, he said nothing. But when OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot became a hit in 2022, he started paying attention.
“That’s when the sour grapes come in,” Mr. Savitt said.
Mr Musk, the first witness called by his lawyers, spoke of his formative years leading up to the creation of OpenAI, including as a young lumberjack – a surprise to many in the courtroom – and his belief that he could help shape the future through technology.
Thirty minutes into this journey through his career, Mr. Musk said the goal of Neuralink, his start-up that aims to implant computer chips in people’s heads, is “the safety of artificial intelligence.”
“If we can achieve a symbiosis of AI and human,” he said. “We can achieve an AI that is better for humanity.”
Throughout his testimony, Mr. Musk said his various companies seek to benefit humanity. He said he created OpenAI after a chat with Google co-founder Larry Page, who called Mr Musk a “specieist”, meaning a person who favors humans over the digital life forms of the future.
“I wanted the company to be a counterbalance to Google — to be the opposite of Google,” he said. He added that the company would not have a “profit motive” and would freely share its technology with the rest of the world. He described himself as the driving force behind building a non-profit AI lab before it was taken away from him.
“I came up with the name, recruited the key people and got the funding,” Musk said. He admitted that he was part of the discussions to create a profitable part of the business, but he wanted the profit to be small. Earnings were fine, he added, “as long as the tail doesn’t wag the dog.”
Before the judge ended testimony for the day, Mr. Musk said he ended up quitting OpenAI because the other founders demanded too much equity in the for-profit company and the profit-making process became too annoying. He is expected to continue his testimony Wednesday morning.
(The Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. Both companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Mr. Musk filed the suit in 2024, nine years after he and Mr. Altman and Greg Brockman, the company president also named in the suit, founded OpenAI with several AI researchers.
They soon realized that the non-profit organization could not raise the huge amount of money they needed. Mr. Musk proposed putting OpenAI into his electric car company Tesla, according to emails admitted as evidence in the court case. But he eventually left in a power struggle with Mr. Altman.
Mr. Altman and OpenAI received $1 billion from Microsoft and agreed to license OpenAI technologies to the tech giant. Mr. Musk eventually founded his own artificial intelligence company, xAI.
Last year, OpenAI restructured its for-profit company to prepare for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street, but the original nonprofit retained control of the company.
Mr. Musk this year put xAI into his rocket company SpaceX, which is expected to go public as early as this summer in an offering that could value the company at more than $1.5 trillion. In fact, Mr. Musk is in court just as SpaceX decided to present its case to existing and potential investors at its facility in Hawthorne, California, this week.
If the jury finds in Mr. Musk’s favor, Judge Gonzalez Rogers will decide on monetary damages and other remedies.
