Elon Musk is testifying in an Oakland federal court against OpenAI, seeking over $134 billion in damages and Sam Altman's removal, claiming the company's shift from nonprofit to for profit (now valued at $850 billion) violated its founding agreement. OpenAI's lawyers countered by…
Musk Says AI Could Kill Us All. He Also Wants a Piece of the Lab Worth $850 Billion.
That is the tension at the center of an Oakland federal courtroom, where Elon Musk spent Tuesday on the witness stand in a lawsuit that is nominally about the founding agreement of OpenAI and actually about something far more uncomfortable for the AI safety movement.
Musk is seeking more than $134 billion in damages and the removal of Sam Altman as CEO, arguing that OpenAI's conversion from nonprofit research lab to a for-profit structure now worth more than $850 billion violated the terms of the agreement that created it. In testimony before a nine-person jury, he invoked Terminator as the outcome he fears most and predicted AI will be as smart as any human as soon as next year. He described meeting with Barack Obama in 2015 specifically to warn him about AI risks. And he told the jury that Larry Page, Google's co-founder, once called him a "specieist" for believing humans mattered more than future digital life — a conversation he said is literally the reason OpenAI was founded.
OpenAI's lawyers spent Tuesday dismantling that portrait with Musk's own words.
Internal emails from 2017, introduced by OpenAI's lead attorney William Savitt, show that Musk himself advocated converting the organization to a for-profit entity. Savitt told the jury that Musk's own email response to the question of for-profit conversion was explicit: he supported it, so long as he was in control. Savitt called the lawsuit "sour grapes" from a man who used his funding as "a financial gun to the head of other founders" and left to start a competing lab after failing to install himself as CEO. Microsoft, also a defendant, noted that Musk never called Satya Nadella to raise concerns about the Microsoft partnership despite posting on X in 2020 that OpenAI was "essentially captured" by Microsoft.
Musk told the court he chose the nonprofit structure deliberately — that he could have started it as a for-profit and specifically chose not to. OpenAI's lawyers showed the jury the original 2015 founding charter, which described the mission as creating technology for the public benefit and declared it not organized for private gain. Musk said he founded it as a charitable counterweight to Google, poured in roughly $38 million, and was deceived into believing it would remain nonprofit.
The jury will determine liability only. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will decide any remedies separately, including whether to order OpenAI to unwind its for-profit restructuring — an outcome the company has argued would be "unprecedented" in a private breach of charitable trust suit. An unwind would complicate OpenAI's path to an IPO that analysts have valued at more than $850 billion, according to Reuters.
The irony of Musk positioning himself as a defender of American charitable giving was not lost on observers. The Musk Foundation has failed to distribute the legally required 5% of its assets for four consecutive years, according to public filings reviewed by Fortune. Musk returns to the stand Wednesday for continued direct examination, followed by cross-examination. Altman, Brockman, and Nadella are also expected to testify.