Inside the OpenAI Trial: Musk Takes the Stand as $134 Billion Reckoning Begins

The nine jurors who will decide one of the most consequential legal cases in artificial intelligence history filed into a federal courtroom in Oakland, California, on Monday under an unusual constraint: virtually everyone in the jury pool had already formed a strong opinion about the plaintiff.

“People don’t like him,” one prospective juror said plainly during voir dire, referring to Elon Musk. Selecting a panel willing to weigh the evidence without prejudice took the better part of Day 1. By Tuesday morning, opening arguments had begun — and by Tuesday afternoon, Musk himself was on the witness stand.

A Charity, Stolen

Steve Molo, lead attorney for Musk, opened the trial with a blunt frame: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are here today because the defendants in this case stole a charity.”

The claim encapsulates Musk’s entire legal theory. When he co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and others, Musk argues, all parties agreed to a specific structure: a nonprofit organization, open-sourced to the public, designed to develop AI for the benefit of humanity rather than for private profit. The founding charter, introduced as evidence by Musk’s attorneys, declares that OpenAI “is not organized for the private gain of any person” and would seek to create “open source technology for the public benefit.”

What followed, Musk contends, was a decade-long betrayal of that charter. OpenAI evolved from a scrappy nonprofit into a hybrid entity with a capped-profit arm, then into what he characterizes as a de facto for-profit company now valued above $300 billion and plotting an IPO that could make its executives extraordinarily wealthy. Musk is seeking up to $134 billion in alleged wrongful gains, the ouster of CEO Altman and President Greg Brockman, and a court order compelling OpenAI to return to its nonprofit mission.

The Google Origin Story

Musk’s most revealing testimony addressed why he created OpenAI in the first place — and at its center is Larry Page.

In 2015, Musk said, he had an argument with Google’s co-founder about AI safety. Musk described Page as dismissive of concerns about artificial general intelligence, accusing him of calling Musk a “specieist” — someone who irrationally privileges human life over other forms of intelligence, including digital ones. “Larry Page called me a ‘specieist,’” Musk recounted from the stand, the term underscoring what he saw as Page’s indifference to existential AI risk.

That exchange crystallized for Musk what he believed was a dangerous trajectory: Google, the world’s most powerful AI lab at the time, was racing toward artificial general intelligence with no meaningful commitment to public accountability or safety. The solution he landed on was a counterweight — “an open source nonprofit as opposed to a closed source for-profit,” in his words. OpenAI was meant to be that institution.

“I have extreme concerns over AI,” Musk testified. “It could make everyone prosperous. But it could also kill us all.” He predicts AI will be “smarter than any human” within the next year.

Musk said he conceived of the company, came up with the name, recruited the founding team, shared his knowledge, and provided all initial funding. In his telling, OpenAI was his creation — one that was subsequently captured by commercial interests he never authorized.

OpenAI’s Counternarrative

OpenAI’s lead attorney, Bill Savitt, offered a sharply different account in his opening statement.

“We are here because Mr. Musk turned out to be very wrong about OpenAI,” Savitt told the jury. “We are here now because Mr. Musk now competes with OpenAI.”

The defense theory is that Musk’s lawsuit is not a principled defense of charitable mission but a competitive attack on a rival. After leaving OpenAI’s board in 2018 — over what the company says was a failed bid for total operational control — Musk founded xAI, which launched the Grok model series and is now competing directly with OpenAI in consumer and enterprise AI markets. From OpenAI’s perspective, Musk lost a power struggle, left, built a competitor, and is now using litigation to destabilize the company he couldn’t control.

OpenAI’s attorneys have also disputed the founding narrative directly. They argue that Musk himself pushed for a for-profit structure at various points during OpenAI’s early years, seeking a role that would have given him dominance over the company’s direction — precisely the kind of centralized, for-profit control he now claims to oppose. When the board declined to give him that authority, he departed.

The case sits in federal district court in Oakland, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers presiding. The legal claims encompass breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and unjust enrichment. Musk’s legal team expanded the scope of claims dramatically just weeks before trial, which OpenAI characterized as a “legal ambush” — an accusation that itself suggests the litigation strategy is designed at least partly to impose costs on a company preparing for a public offering.

Stakes Beyond the Courtroom

The trial’s implications extend well past the specific dispute between two of the wealthiest people on earth.

If Musk prevails — even partially — the ruling could force OpenAI to restructure in ways that complicate or delay its planned IPO, potentially affecting a company that has disclosed $25 billion in annualized revenue and is seeking a valuation above $300 billion. It could also establish legal precedents about the obligations of AI labs to preserve nonprofit charters, with implications for every major AI organization that began life as a research nonprofit before pivoting toward commercial structures.

If OpenAI prevails, it will likely be interpreted as a signal that courts are unwilling to second-guess the governance decisions of AI companies based on arguments about founding intent — clearing the path for the sector’s continued commercialization with limited judicial interference.

The trial is expected to run several weeks. Other witnesses expected to testify include Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and former OpenAI board members who were present during the organization’s 2023 internal crisis, when Altman was briefly fired and then reinstated. That episode — in which the board attempted to remove Altman over concerns about his candor, only to reverse course under pressure from Microsoft and the broader investor community — will likely feature prominently in arguments about whether the company’s leadership has been truthful with stakeholders.

A Window Into AI’s Political Economy

Regardless of outcome, the Musk v. Altman trial is functioning as an involuntary deposition of the entire AI frontier era. Internal emails, board communications, and founding documents are entering the public record that would otherwise remain confidential. The competing accounts of OpenAI’s history — who founded it, on what terms, and who betrayed whom — are being litigated in a proceeding that anyone can attend.

For an industry that has operated with extraordinary opacity about its governance, financing, and internal deliberations, the Oakland courthouse is providing an unusually detailed look at how the world’s most powerful AI laboratory actually came to be — and who believes they were wronged in its making.