OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, its President Greg Brockman and Microsoft for allegedly breaching the company’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
Musk, who left OpenAI in February 2018, is seeking $150 billion in damages and an order that OpenAI strip its for-profit ambitions.
The nine-person jury trial began on Tuesday and will last three weeks in Oakland, California.
In 2015, Musk, Altman, Brockman and three others co-founded OpenAI to be a more responsible and safer AI model than those being built by profit-driven companies like Google and Meta. Between 2015 and 2017, Musk gave OpenAI $38 million.
After Musk left the nonprofit, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019. This allowed the company to raise the money it needed to develop its models more quickly. During his testimony Tuesday, Musk said he wasn’t opposed to a for-profit subsidiary, “as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog.”
In 2024, Musk sued OpenAI, claiming that Altman used his donations to enrich himself. The company’s shift away from a nonprofit amounted to theft, Musk’s attorney Steven Molo argued on Tuesday.
“No one should be allowed to steal a charity,” he said. “To steal a charity is absolutely wrong.”
On Wednesday, he said, “They can’t have it both ways. They can’t have a nonprofit and free funding and the positive halo effect of being a nonprofit charity and also enrich themselves greatly.”
What’s the crux of the Elon Musk-OpenAI lawsuit?
At its root, Musk and Altman’s nearly decade-long feud stems from differing visions of AI’s relationship with humanity. Musk has described himself as a “humanist,” whose chief concern is protecting and benefiting humanity. He has long expressed concern that Altman’s push for rapid innovation without safeguards will hurt humanity.
During opening statements on Tuesday, Molo asked for Musk’s views on AI. Musk said he worries about what will happen when computers become smarter than humans, which he believes could happen as early as next year.
Then, when asked what prompted OpenAI’s founding, Musk recounted a debate from 2013 with Google co-founder Larry Page. Musk argued that AI could make humans irrelevant or extinct, which Page dismissed as “specist” (biased toward humans).
Walter Isaacman similarly recorded Musk’s feud with Page in his 2023 biography of Musk. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO told Page, “Well, yes, I am pro-human. I (expletive) like humanity, dude.”
So Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman and four others to be a nonprofit, open-source counter to Google’s emerging AI dominance.
As of early April, OpenAI had an $852 billion valuation.
What did Altman’s defense attorney say?
OpenAI’s defense presented Musk’s lawsuit as a result of the co-founder not “get(ting) his way.”
In his opening arguments Tuesday, lead counsel William Savitt said the lawsuit was “sour grapes” over OpenAI’s commercial success after ChatGPT was made public in 2022. “My clients had the nerve to go on and succeed without him. Mr. Musk did not like that.”
Then Savitt showed the jury emails sent before Musk left the company. In them, the chiefs of staff debated ways to set up a for-profit OpenAI operation. They allegedly proposed giving Musk a 55% stake and Altman a 7.5% stake in the for-profit effort.
Savitt also defended the legality of OpenAI’s structure, saying the nonprofit “remains in control of the organization” and was “doing leading edge work to cure diseases and promote economic diversity.”
The lawsuit, Savitt said, is a way for Musk to delay OpenAI’s progress while his own AI startup, xAI, catches up to speed.
At one point, Savitt asked Musk if he agreed that xAI’s chatbot Grok “lags much farther behind” ChatGPT. Musk responded, “Not anymore.”
Musk also acknowledged that xAI was founded as a traditional for-profit company. But that is not a problem, he said. A problem occurs when you “create a nonprofit and turn it into a for-profit,” he added.
Judge asks Musk to ‘keep things to a minimum’ about the trial on X
The jury trial is not televised; details have emerged slowly with reports from press present in the courthouse.
Before lawyers made their opening statements on Tuesday, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers asked Musk, Altman and others to “keep things to a minimum on social media.”
On Monday, in a post viewed 36 million times, Musk had written, “Scam Altman and Greg Stockman stole a charity. Full stop.” Throughout the post, Musk referred to Altman as “Scam” and said that after the lawsuit, the OpenAI CEO “will also be awarded tens of billions in stock directly.”
“How can we get things done without you making things worse outside the courtroom?” Gonzalez Rogers asked. Musk said he was just responding to things OpenAI had said online.
Then Musk and Altman agreed to begin again with a “clean slate” and “keep things to a minimum” online.
Since Judge Gonzalez Rogers made the request, Musk has refrained from making direct statements about the trial, but he has replied to or reposted what others have said about the lawsuit.