Elon Musk’s voice rose in a packed federal courtroom Wednesday, April 29 as OpenAI’s lawyer pressed him on the math that launched a billion-dollar betrayal lawsuit: Musk promised up to $1 billion to the AI nonprofit he co-founded in 2015, but wire transfers show he sent just $38 million before walking away. “Without me, OpenAI wouldn’t exist!” Musk said, his frustration breaking through as William Savitt, the attorney representing Sam Altman and OpenAI, questioned whether the world’s richest man actually delivered on his founding commitment.
The exchange marked the second day of testimony in a trial that could unwind the $852 billion company preparing for one of the largest IPOs in tech history, and revealed a courtroom battle where both sides are fighting over who really “stole” the future of artificial intelligence.
The trial, now in its third day at Oakland’s federal courthouse, has Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers intervening repeatedly to stop Musk and Savitt from talking over each other as nine jurors watch the billionaire founders’ decade-long friendship collapse into accusations of fraud, broken promises, and competing visions for AI safety.
Before Musk took the stand Tuesday April 27, Savitt delivered a sharp opening statement: “We are here because Mr. Musk didn’t get his way at OpenAI. That’s what happened. He quit, saying they would fail for sure. But my clients had the nerve to go on and succeed without him.”
Here’s everything that exploded in court over two days of testimony
1. Musk Claims He Created OpenAI as “Counterweight to Google” After Larry Page Called Him "Speciesist for Being Pro-Human"
Testifying Tuesday under questioning from his own lawyer Steven Molo, Musk walked jurors through the origin story: he got into an argument about AI safety with Google co-founder Larry Page, who dismissed Musk’s concerns about protecting humanity by calling him “a speciesist for being pro-human.” Musk said he found Page’s stance “insane” and decided the world needed a nonprofit alternative to Google’s AI ambitions, something open-source, safe, and built for humanity’s benefit rather than shareholder profits.
“I could have started it as a for-profit and I chose not to,” Musk testified, explaining he deliberately structured OpenAI as a charity that would never enrich any individual person. The testimony established Musk’s core argument: OpenAI was always supposed to be a nonprofit, he recruited the talent and provided the early funding specifically because of that mission, and Altman later broke those promises by pivoting to a commercial structure that made insiders wealthy.
2. Musk Warned Obama About AI Risks, Framed Case as “Terminator vs Star Trek” Future
Musk testified he tried to warn then-President Obama about AI dangers in 2015, saying “AI was not good enough to seem scary smart” at the time but “here we are in 2026, AI is very smart.” He framed humanity’s choice in pop culture terms: “We don’t want to have a Terminator outcome. We want to be in a Gene Roddenberry outcome, like Star Trek. Not so much a James Cameron movie like Terminator.”
The testimony positioned Musk as someone who’s been sounding the alarm for over a decade, talking to “anyone and everyone” about AI safety even though his brother told him “it’s a buzzkill.”
3. The $38 Million vs $1 Billion Dispute: "I Contributed My Reputation, These Things All Have Value"
The courtroom tension escalated Wednesday when Savitt confronted Musk with the funding gap: Musk publicly committed “up to $1 billion” when OpenAI launched, but his actual contributions from December 2015 through May 2017 totaled just $38 million in wire transfers plus rent for office space he leased to the nonprofit.
“Without me, OpenAI wouldn’t exist!” Musk said, raising his voice as Savitt pressed him on the shortfall, arguing that he contributed far more than cash. He provided his reputation, recruited top AI researchers like Ilya Sutskever and Andrej Karpathy, came up with the name, and taught the team “everything I know.” Musk maintained that “$38 million is still a lot of money” and said he stopped funding OpenAI because he “lost confidence in the team” by late 2017, believing they were heading in the wrong direction.
Savitt countered by showing emails where Musk discussed potential for-profit structures as early as 2016, suggesting Musk himself was exploring commercial options while simultaneously claiming the nonprofit mission was sacred.
Damilare Odedina
4. Microsoft’s $10 Billion Investment Was the “Tipping Point,” Musk Texted Altman: "What the Hell Is Going On?"
Musk testified that Microsoft’s massive investment in early 2023 convinced him that Altman had betrayed OpenAI’s charitable mission. “At a $10 billion scale, there’s no way Microsoft is just giving that as a donation,” Musk said, explaining that an investment of that size meant Microsoft expected financial returns, not altruistic AI development.
“With all due respect to Microsoft, do you really want Microsoft controlling digital superintelligence?” Musk asked the courtroom. He said the moment he learned about the deal, he texted Altman directly: “What the hell is going on?” or “This is a bait and switch,” demanding to know why OpenAI had accepted an investment that fundamentally changed its structure from nonprofit to a vehicle for investor profits. By late 2022, Musk said, “I’d lost trust in Altman and I was concerned that they were really trying to steal the charity, it turned out to be true.”
5. “Your Questions Are Designed to Trick Me,” Judge Intervened as Musk Sparred With OpenAI’s Lawyer
The cross-examination turned combative as Savitt asked Musk yes-or-no questions about emails, term sheets, and donation commitments. “Your questions are not simple, they are designed to trick me, essentially,” Musk shot back, refusing to give simple answers and insisting the context mattered.
At one point Musk tried to compare Savitt’s questioning to asking “have you stopped beating your wife?” (a classic example of a loaded question), but Judge Gonzalez Rogers cut him off immediately: “We are not going to go there,” she said, prompting laughter in the courtroom. The exchanges escalated enough that Gonzalez Rogers had to intervene multiple times, telling both Musk and Savitt to stop talking over each other so the jury and court reporter could follow what was happening.
Savitt maintained he was asking “fair questions” and doing his best, but Musk responded flatly: “That is not true.”
6. Musk Didn’t Know What a “Safety Card” Is Despite Claiming OpenAI Abandoned AI Safety
In a moment that undercut Musk’s positioning as an AI safety champion, Savitt asked whether Musk knew about OpenAI’s “safety cards,” the industry-standard documents AI companies publish alongside major model releases detailing capabilities, risks, and safety testing. Musk smiled and replied: “Safety card? Why would it be a card?” He said he didn’t know what a safety card was, even though his lawsuit centers on claims that OpenAI abandoned safety commitments.
Savitt implied Musk doesn’t actually possess internal knowledge of OpenAI’s current safety efforts to make credible assessments, pointedly asking “You just don’t know” what OpenAI does for safety. Musk conceded he didn’t know OpenAI’s internal safety practices but maintained his concern that “a nonprofit suddenly is a for-profit with unlimited profit” creates inherent safety risks, including at his own AI company xAI, which he admitted also operates as a for-profit.
7. Sam Altman Vanished From the Courtroom During Key Testimony, Greg Brockman Stayed
Altman was conspicuously absent from the courtroom during large portions of Musk’s testimony Wednesday, April 29, even though he sat prominently during Tuesday’s opening statements and Musk’s initial testimony. Observers noted Altman wasn’t present when Musk made some of his most aggressive accusations, including calling Altman and Brockman charity thieves who “looted the nonprofit.”
Brockman, OpenAI’s president and the other named defendant, remained in the courtroom throughout the proceedings, watching as Musk testified that both executives violated their charitable mission. Altman did make a virtual appearance at an Amazon Web Services event Tuesday during a court recess, telling attendees in a pre-recorded video, “I wish I could be there with you in person today, my schedule got taken away from me today.”
8. Emails Show Musk Wanted 4 Board Seats vs Cofounders’ 3, Stopped $5 Million Quarterly Payments When Denied
Savitt methodically walked through emails suggesting Musk himself considered for-profit structures and demanded control of OpenAI. In late 2017 emails, Musk demanded 4 board seats while the other cofounders would share just 3 seats among them, giving Musk voting control. Though he said this control would decrease over time as new investors demanded seats, the initial structure gave him unequivocal power.
When those plans fell apart and Musk didn’t get the control he wanted, he stopped his quarterly $5 million payments to OpenAI in spring 2017. An August 2017 email from his family office head asked if they should continue withholding. Musk replied: “Yes.”
Musk directed Shivon Zilis (a venture capitalist, former OpenAI board member, and mother of four of Musk’s children) to explore corporate structure options including rolling everything into a “B corp” or creating an “OpenAI C Corp and OpenAI non-profit” structure. When Savitt asked if Musk was “never really committed to OpenAI being a nonprofit,” Musk firmly denied it: “No, what you’re saying is false.”
But the emails showed Musk writing in 2016 that setting up OpenAI as a nonprofit might “in hindsight, have been the wrong move” because the “sense of urgency is not as high” compared to for-profit competitors.
9. Musk Admitted He Poached Top OpenAI Talent for Tesla While Sitting on OpenAI’s Board
Savitt revealed that Musk hired away Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI’s top researchers, to work on autonomous driving at Tesla in 2017, while Musk was still serving on OpenAI’s board. In an email presented as evidence, Musk wrote: “Just talked to Andrej and he accepted joining as director of Tesla Vision… Andrej is arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision after Ilya. The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me but it had to be done.”
When asked if he had a responsibility as a board member to keep Karpathy at OpenAI rather than recruiting him away, Musk responded: “I think people should have a right to work where they want to work… It’s a free country.” Musk also authorized Neuralink employees to recruit from OpenAI, telling them “I have no problem if you pitch people at OpenAI to work at Neuralink.”
10. Musk: “I Was a Fool” Who Gave Free Funding to Create an $800 Billion Company
In one of the trial’s most quotable moments, Musk expressed regret about his early OpenAI involvement: “I was a fool who provided them free funding to create a start-up, I gave them $38 million of essentially free funding to create what would become an $800 billion company.” He repeatedly told the jury that Altman and Brockman “can’t have your cake and eat it too,” they can’t claim the moral authority and tax benefits of running a charity while personally enriching themselves through the for-profit subsidiary.
“They should not get rich off a nonprofit, that’s not right,” Musk said, framing his lawsuit as defending the integrity of charitable giving in America. His lawyers argued that if OpenAI gets away with this transformation, it sets a precedent that could destroy trust in every nonprofit: donors won’t give if they believe charities can simply convert to for-profits and enrich insiders.
11. Judge Warned Both Sides to Stop Posting on Social Media: "Let’s Let This Play Through, Perhaps You’ve Never Done That Before"
Before testimony began Tuesday, Judge Gonzalez Rogers directly addressed both legal teams about their social media activity, referencing Musk’s posts on X calling Altman “Scam Altman” and Brockman “Greg Stockman.” “All of you try to control your propensity to use social media to make things worse outside this courtroom,” she said. “Let’s let this play through. Perhaps you’ve never done that before. This would be a first.”
The comment drew knowing laughter from the courtroom, acknowledging that Musk in particular has never been one to stay quiet during legal battles. Gonzalez Rogers, who previously presided over Epic Games’ antitrust lawsuit against Apple, has shown she won’t tolerate billionaire defendants trying to influence proceedings through public statements.
Damilare Odedina
