Musk wanted 80 billion for Mars — and needed OpenAI control to raise it, Brockman testifies

Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, told a California courtroom on Tuesday that Elon Musk once demanded full control of the AI lab — specifically so he could raise $80 billion to build a city on Mars.

The testimony, delivered in the second week of Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, offered the clearest view yet into the financial architecture behind a case both sides have framed as a dispute over nonprofit principles. The reality, the trial record shows, is more entangled.

Musk is seeking $150 billion in damages and the removal of Sam Altman and Brockman from OpenAI's leadership. OpenAI is targeting a $1 trillion IPO. SpaceX — Musk's rocket company — has also filed confidentially for a public offering this year that could value it in the trillions. Both companies have reasons to want the other's case to fail, and both are racing toward public markets where the "mission" framing will face immediate investor scrutiny. Musk tried to acquire OpenAI directly: in February 2025, he led an investor group offering $97.4 billion for control, an offer Altman rejected immediately.

Brockman, pressed by Musk's lawyers on Monday, disclosed that his stake in OpenAI is worth almost $30 billion — a figure not previously known. He also holds stakes in Cerebras, the AI chip startup, and Helion Energy, the fusion company. Altman gave Brockman a stake in his family fund worth $10 million in 2017, an arrangement Musk's team argued compromised Brockman's loyalty.

The $80 billion Mars figure traces to a 2017 meeting where Brockman said Musk outlined his vision for a self-sustaining city on the red planet and made clear that he would need full control of OpenAI to raise the capital. "He said he needed $80 billion to create a city on Mars," Brockman testified. "In the end, he needed full control."

The SpaceX registration statement reviewed by Reuters shows the Mars compensation structure is not merely historical. SpaceX's board approved awarding Musk 200 million super-voting restricted shares — each carrying 10 votes — if the company reaches a $7.5 trillion market value and establishes a permanent colony on Mars with at least 1 million people. The IPO roadshow is expected in mid-June.

Musk's legal team has portrayed the case as a matter of principle: he donated roughly $38 million to OpenAI, which was supposed to remain a nonprofit safety counterweight to Google, and watched it convert into a commercial enterprise that has since raised over $100 billion. "You can't just steal a charity," Musk told the jury.

But OpenAI has countered that Musk left the board before the company's success and is now trying to reclaim influence over a rival. The company's lawyers have noted that Musk's own AI venture, xAI, used OpenAI's technology to train its own models — a practice known as distilling, or transferring learned patterns from one AI system to another — and that SpaceX's Mars colony bonus structure suggests motivations beyond charity enforcement.

OpenAI's own spending ambitions landed in the trial record on Tuesday: Brockman said the company plans to spend $50 billion on computing resources in 2026. The company has said it will buy a significant volume of Cerebras chips.

The entanglement runs in both directions. If Musk wins $150 billion in damages, the money flows to OpenAI's nonprofit foundation — the same foundation that would oversee a company preparing to IPO at a $1 trillion valuation. The damages award would be the largest in US corporate history, dwarfing anything related to the railroad monopolies or Standard Oil. Whether a court can actually compel either outcome is an open legal question. Corporate governance experts have noted there is no precedent for tying executive compensation to interplanetary colonization goals, and legal scholars question whether the $150 billion damages figure, flowing to the nonprofit that would then oversee a $1 trillion IPO, creates an accountability structure or an incentive to litigate rather than build.

The trial is scheduled to conclude its liability phase by May 21. Altman and Brockman are expected to testify before then.