OpenAI Co-Founder Greg Brockman Defends Company's For-Profit Pivot... And His Own $30 Billion Payday
Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times,
In the second week of a high-profile jury trial that could have profound impact on the race for artificial intelligence, OpenAI president Greg Brockman rejected allegations that he and other co-founders betrayed the company’s philanthropic mission and illegally enriched themselves by flipping the non-profit lab into a for-profit corporation.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk in 2024 sued Brockman and CEO Sam Altman, alleging they bilked him of $38 million in donations then restructured as a for-profit corporation by exclusively licensing their flagship product to Microsoft—betraying a founding mission to operate as an open-source charity that would counter the risks of profit-driven AI.
OpenAI and Microsoft deny the allegations, arguing that Musk abandoned the company in 2018 to start his own for-profit competitor, xAI, when other founders rejected his bid to take full control of the operation.
“I think we’ve been very consistent on the mission,” Brockman told a federal court in Oakland.
“If you look at what we’ve accomplished—currently the foundation has $150 billion worth of OpenAI equity value. That’s something we’ve built through hard blood, sweat, and tears through all this time since Elon left.”
The company’s nonprofit foundation has a 27 percent stake in OpenAI’s for-profit corporation; Microsoft, which has invested more than $13 billion since 2019, owns 26 percent.
Called as an adverse witness for the plaintiff, Brockman over two days May 4–5 offered testimony outlining an alternate narrative and timeframe than the one Musk presented the week prior.
Brockman also attempted to add context to what he has claimed were “cherrypicked” segments of his personal diary, unsealed during the discovery process.
He often spoke in incomplete sentences, punctuated by stock phrases like, “We were solving for the mission.”
Arguably, this had less zing to it than, “You can’t just steal a charity”—a phrase Musk favored in his own testimony.
‘Morally Bankrupt’
Musk’s attorney Steven Molo grilled Brockman on a series of diary entries from 2017 and 2018, a time of intense negotiations with Musk over the future structure of the company.
In one from 2017, Brockman muses, “It’d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from [Musk] and turn it into a B-Corp without him—doing so would be pretty morally bankrupt.”
Brockman denied this contradicted his commitment to OpenAI’s mission. “I think I meant it would actually serve the mission, but it would be hard to look at yourself in the mirror,” he told the court.
Under cross-examination, he explained he was referring to the idea of voting Musk off the board of directors, which he had considered at the time.
“It had been made clear to us,” he said, “that if we didn’t come to [Musk’s] terms, he was going to start an AGI competitor.”
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the hypothetical point at which digital intelligence reaches or surpasses human cognitive abilities and can operate autonomously.
Some, including Musk, believe we have already achieved an early version of it, and that AGI advancement in the wrong hands poses the greatest existential threat to humanity. Musk testified that this threat was the express motivation for creating OpenAI as an open-source, nonprofit lab.
From late 2017 to early 2018, Musk, Altman, Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever, another OpenAI co-founder and its former chief scientist, floated various ideas as they debated how to fund the project at a competitive level.
Musk, the main donor, rejected an even equity split among the four co-founders, instead proposing a deal that would give him majority stake, to be diluted as more investors joined.
Brockman said he and Sutskever were willing to accept Musk being CEO and having a majority stake. “But the one thing we could not accept was to hand him unilateral total control over the AGI.”
Musk was the wrong man for the job, according to Brockman.
“Look, he knows rockets, he knows electric cars, he did not and I believe does not know AI,” Brockman said of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO.
“And Ilya and I did not think he was going to spend the time required to actually get good at it.”
Brockman alleged Musk “didn’t recognize that spark” in early language models underlying the GPT technology. “It was there, a working version, we could see the promise. … We really needed someone running the company that had that effect.”
Molo pressed the witness, pointing to emails from Musk proposing a 16-person board for the new corporation, in which Musk would have a 25 percent influence.
“This is the man you’re saying wanted to be the AI tyrant and have absolute and total control?” Molo probed.
“He wanted a board, and conducted in a way you were not familiar with because you didn’t have the experience of corporate governance, did you?”
Brockman acknowledged, “Definitely, this is something I was new to,” but maintained that there was never a real plan for Musk to relinquish control.
In a January 2018 email to Musk and others, Brockman stressed that a moral high ground was “our best tool,” and to maintain it, the company should endeavor to remain a nonprofit. “AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity.”
But back in November 2017, Molo pointed out that Brockman’s diary entries show he was worried about how it would look if the founders continued to say they were committed to a nonprofit while planning to convert to a for-profit.
“Cannot say that we are committed to the nonprofit. Don’t wanna say that we’re committed. If three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie,” Brockman wrote. “Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight.”
When Musk issued an ultimatum in 2018 to “either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Brockman said he was “devastated.”
“It felt like we were so close to something that could actually succeed at the mission … and it was all blown up.”
$30 Billion Question
Molo accused Brockman of plotting to use OpenAI to become a billionaire, this time referencing journal entries made six days after he’d told Musk he wanted to continue to fundraise for the nonprofit, in which he asks, “What will take me to $1 billion?”
“There’s a lot of context here,” Brockman said. “It was expression of a frustration, not a plan.”
He described it as a “fork in the road,” where he would either accept Musk’s terms or part ways with him.
The road without Musk led Brockman to a $30-billion equity stake in OpenAI’s for-profit corporation. But Brockman said it was not about the money: “I think I’d be happy with either of those routes,” he said in court.
Molo pounced. Why then, if he was “good with a billion,” would Brockman not donate the extra $29 billion to the nonprofit to which he had a fiduciary duty?
“That was really about picking between these two roads … which one will I actually be happy with? ... Feel enthusiastic getting out of bed, and do [sic] the work every day?” Brockman said.
“It takes $30 billion to get you out of bed in the morning, but $1 billion doesn’t get you out of bed?” Molo asked. “You had a fiduciary duty. … You took the assets from the nonprofit, you moved them into the for-profit to create this money-making machine that resulted in you having $30 billion.”
Implying that he raided the charity to enrich himself was “a deep mischaracterization,” Brockman said.
Molo also grilled Brockman on a commitment he made to donate $100,000 to the nonprofit but never delivered—and on billions in deals that OpenAI has secured with at least three other companies in which Brockman has an ownership stake.
The plaintiff’s attorney also highlighted a 2017 “side deal” in which Altman gave Brockman around $10 million of equity in the company holding assets of his personal family office.
When pressed, Brockman said he didn’t conceal this from Musk.
“Elon’s time was relatively hard to get, there were a lot of decisions to make that we weren’t able to broadcast to him,” he told the jury.
Sam Altman listens as OpenAI President Greg Brockman testifies during Elon Musk's lawsuit trial over OpenAI's for-profit conversion before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers at a federal courthouse in Oakland, Calif., on May 4, 2026, in a courtroom sketch. Vicki Behringer/Reuters
Origins
Under cross-examination, Brockman told a story about the beginnings of OpenAI—from which Musk was conspicuously absent.
The spark, he said, began at a small dinner party in Menlo Park, where attendees considered whether it was too late to create an AI lab that could compete with Google’s Deep Mind project—at the time, the world leader in AI. That was in July 2015.
Musk was there, Brockman said, but the real catalyst was an agreement between himself and Altman, the same night, that “this was the most important thing we could imagine doing.”
He got to work, acting along with Altman as “the main drivers” of the project.
By November, they had assembled a list of 10 names for an “offsite” event in Napa Valley, nine of whom ended up joining OpenAI’s team. “It was an amazing day of creative energy, people really clicked,” Brockman said. So much so that, as their van remained stalled in traffic for 1.5 hours, “no one noticed because the conversation was so good.”
Brockman said he had no contact with Musk between the dinner and the offsite. “I expected he would donate,” he said of the Tesla founder, suggesting his role was relegated to little more than closing calls and occasional advice.
Under re-direct, Molo challenged this characterization.
“I know he wasn’t in the van with you guys on the highway, but he was instrumental in founding and kickstarting OpenAI, was he not?” Molo said, noting that Musk provided the dominant funding, vision, and leveraged his formidable relationships to recruit talent and resources.
Mission Creep
Brockman also denied that Musk was concerned with open-sourcing the company’s technology, or keeping it as a non-profit forever.
By the time the company made its public launch in December 2015, Brockman said, Musk was already considering they might need to add a for-profit corporation in order to be competitive. But the Tesla CEO’s concurrent pledge to donate $1 billion never materialized.
Musk donated an estimated $38 million to OpenAI from 2015 through 2020.
OpenAI’s mission statement, posted in 2015, notes a goal of advancing digital intelligence “in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
Brockman edited the original, in which Musk had used the word “unencumbered.”
“I understood this as a lack of constraint, we had a lot of freedom. We had not made commitments,” Brockman said Monday.
In 2023, the year Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary (the company restructured in 2025 to its current form, a public benefit corporation), Brockman wrote the board with a proposed change to the OpenAI charter, indicating he had been “wrong at times” about the original set up, and that “we’ve grown to regard capitalism not as a constraint, but instead, as a positive force,” according to evidence presented by Musk’s attorneys.
The Board never approved the updated charter, but Musk’s team argues it articulates a marked shift—away from OpenAI’s mission.
“No way Microsoft is giving that as a donation in any kind of charitable way,“ Musk testified last week, recalling his thoughts at the time. ”This is a bait and switch.”
Realizing that the non-profit would be “subservient” to the for-profit, he said, “This is when I thought there had been a breach of charitable trust.”
Brockman testified he never made any commitments to Musk that OpenAI would remain a nonprofit, nor that it would continue to open source its technology.
Musk is asking that OpenAI be reverted to a nonprofit, that more than $100 billion in damages be returned to it, and that Altman and Brockman be removed from their leadership roles.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told the jury on May 5 that she expects all evidence to be presented by early next week, at which point they may begin their deliberation.