OpenAI president Greg Brockman finished two days of testimony Tuesday, systematically rebutting Elon Musk's claims in the ongoing lawsuit in Oakland federal court. Brockman was clear: he never made any promises to Musk about OpenAI's structure, and nobody else did either. The nonprofit foundation is still in charge, he said — "the most resource-rich nonprofit in the world."
Musk's central allegations were that he poured time, money, and resources into OpenAI and was essential to its success; that Sam Altman and Brockman were trying to "steal a charity"; and that open-sourcing AI was a core promise from day one. Brockman disagreed on all counts. Open source? "That topic wasn't even on the table back then." On recruiting, he acknowledged Musk helped convince some candidates to join, but for others, Musk was a deeply polarizing figure — "some candidates were very interested because of his involvement, others were completely turned off."
Brockman also dropped new details. He revealed that Musk, without prior notice, pulled multiple OpenAI employees to work for free on Tesla's Autopilot team for months. That included former researcher Andrej Karpathy — Musk had claimed Karpathy joined Tesla only after deciding to leave OpenAI, but Brockman said Musk later "apologized and confessed" about the plan, which Brockman knew nothing about.
Why did Musk want control? Brockman quoted Musk directly: from Zip2 to SolarCity, Musk had paid the price for lacking control — "he doesn't like losing control." And here's the kicker: Musk told Brockman he wanted to run OpenAI to raise money to build a city on Mars, which he then estimated would cost about $80 billion.
Brockman recreated the moment negotiations fell apart in vivid detail. Around 2017, the co-founders were discussing equity in a potential for-profit subsidiary. When the conversation turned to who would get how much, Musk's mood shifted dramatically. "You could feel him change completely — he was angry, he was frustrated." Musk rejected the proposal, ripped a Tesla Model 3 poster off the wall, and stormed out. Before leaving, he turned and asked Brockman and the others when they would leave the company. Brockman said he was worried Musk might physically attack him.
On finances, Musk's lawyer Steven Moro pressed Brockman hard. Brockman admitted he once pledged to donate $100,000 to the nonprofit but never followed through. The lawyer also cited a 2017 diary entry: "Financially, what would it take for me to reach $1 billion?" Brockman currently holds about $30 billion in equity in OpenAI's for-profit subsidiary. The lawyer asked why he didn't donate $29 billion back to the foundation; Brockman had no clear answer. He insisted the mission is his primary motivation, and personal financial gain is secondary.
This comes as OpenAI continues to expand its product offerings; the company recently made GPT-5.5 Instant the default model in ChatGPT. Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly raising $4 billion to acquire AI deployment teams.
Trial resumes Wednesday at 8:30 AM Pacific. Shivon Zilis, mother of four of Musk's children and a former OpenAI board member, is expected to testify.