OpenAI president Greg Brockman has kept a private diary for over a decade — hundreds of pages of his most unguarded thoughts. This January, Elon Musk's legal team unearthed the whole thing during discovery. This week in court, the two sides couldn't even agree on what to call it. Musk's lawyers kept referring to it as a "diary," trying to paint it as a confession of conspiracy. OpenAI insisted it's a "journal" — a set of work notes, just executives thinking out loud.
The most damning entry comes from November 2017. Brockman wrote: "The real answer is we want him out." Then: "We can't say we promised non-profit. I don't want to say that. If we turn into a B-Corp in three months, then what we said before was a lie." Musk's team uses those lines to argue that Brockman and Sam Altman planned to siphon off a non-profit. OpenAI counters that the passage is taken out of context — the very next line reads, "Stealing the non-profit from him is wrong, it's morally indefensible."
In court, Brockman said having the whole world read his diary is "very painful, but there's nothing in there that makes me ashamed." He compared his meandering, self-questioning style to an AI model's "chain of thought."
The habit of committing high-stakes business deliberations to paper is drawing ridicule across Silicon Valley. On the All-In podcast, investor Jason Calacanis accused Brockman of "journal-maxxing." David Sacks piled on, calling it "discovery-maxxing" — actively feeding the other side evidence. David Friedberg was blunter: "I love the guy, but what was he thinking? No one I know keeps a diary."