“You can’t just steal a charity,” Elon Musk<\/a>, the world’s richest person, said repeatedly during his time on the stand at a federal courthouse in Oakland, California.\u00a0<\/p>\n Musk’s testimony was the centerpiece of the trial’s first week. It comes two years after the Tesla<\/a> and SpaceX CEO first sued<\/a> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a> and Greg Brockman, the company’s president, alleging they went back on their promises to keep the artificial intelligence startup a nonprofit and to follow its charitable mission.<\/p>\n Musk, who helped start OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit, claims that the roughly $38 million he donated to the project was used for unauthorized commercial purposes. OpenAI, now valued at over $850 billion by private investors, has called Musk’s allegations “baseless.” Musk left OpenAI’s board<\/a> in 2018, and five years later started xAI as a competitor, before merging<\/a> that business with SpaceX in February.\u00a0<\/p>\n The trial began Monday with the seating of a nine-person jury<\/a>. Attorneys for both parties presented opening arguments<\/a> on Tuesday. The main event was Musk’s testimony<\/a>, which stretched over the course of three days, wrapping up on Thursday.\u00a0<\/p>\n The courtroom was dark on Friday, and proceedings will resume next week, with Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, an appointee of former President Barack Obama<\/a>, presiding over the case. Altman and Brockman are expected to testify later this month. <\/p>\n After Musk left OpenAI, the AI lab began moving more towards commercialization, creating a for-profit subsidiary in 2018. The business started booming after the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and the subsequent raising of $10 billion in equity from Microsoft<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Musk testified that he is not entirely against OpenAI having a for-profit unit, but he said it became “the tail wagging the dog.” He repeatedly accused Altman and Brockman of enriching themselves from a charity while also reaping the positive associations that come from running a nonprofit.<\/p>\n “What you can’t do is have your cake and eat it too,” Musk said from the stand.<\/p>\n Musk said he started OpenAI to serve as a “counterweight” to Google<\/a>, which he viewed as having insufficient concerns surrounding AI safety. Musk said he got into an argument about the subject with Google co-founder Larry Page<\/a>, a former friend, who called him a “speciesist for being pro-human.”<\/p>\n Musk said OpenAI wouldn’t exist without him.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people, taught them everything I know, provided all the initial funding,” Musk said.<\/p>\n Musk’s xAI interests<\/p>\n During cross-examination, Musk repeatedly clashed with OpenAI lead counsel William Savitt of Wachtell Lipton. He accused Savitt of lying and asking misleading questions that were “designed to trick” him. <\/p>\n Savitt asked Musk about his involvement in negotiations to establish OpenAI’s for-profit arm, as well as what he knew about the nonprofit’s recent initiatives. He also asked about his competing AI company, xAI<\/a>, which Musk passed off as being a fraction the size of OpenAI with minimal market share, even though he valued it a $250 billion in the merger with SpaceX.<\/p>\n Musk revealed that it’s “partly” true that xAI used some of OpenAI’s technology to train its own models, a process known as distilling. He downplayed xAI’s reliance on OpenAI and said, “It is standard practice to use other AIs to validate your AI.”<\/p>\n Musk told the jury that while he had been growing “uncomfortable” with Altman and Brockman’s behavior around 2017, he didn’t think he had a basis to sue until much later.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I would’ve filed a lawsuit sooner if I thought they’d stolen the charity sooner,” Musk said.\u00a0<\/p>\n In a\u00a0January filing<\/a>, Musk’s attorneys said their client should receive up to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, which is also named as a defendant. Musk’s team now says any “ill-gotten gains” should be returned to OpenAI’s foundation.<\/p>\n Musk is also seeking to have Altman and Brockman removed from their roles<\/a>\u00a0and to “unwind OpenAI’s for-profit conversion and restructuring.”\u00a0<\/p>\n All that’s happening while Musk and Altman are pushing their respective companies towards public offerings that could be the largest in history. SpaceX has already filed confidentially<\/a> with the SEC and is reportedly expected to launch its roadshow in mid-June for an IPO that could value the company in the trillions of dollars. <\/p>\n Following the end of Musk’s testimony on Thursday, his lawyers called Jared Birchall<\/a>, who manages Musk’s family office, as their next witness. <\/p>\n Birchall testified about the specific donations Musk made to OpenAI, as well as his knowledge about Musk’s multibillion-dollar bid to acquire<\/a> OpenAI last year.\u00a0In February of 2025, Musk<\/a>\u00a0led a group of investors in offering to buy control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion, an effort that Altman immediately rejected. <\/p>\n Before the proceedings kicked off on Monday, Gonzalez Rogers opted to split the trial into two parts: a liability phase to determine whether any wrongdoing occurred, and a remedies phase to decide the appropriate outcomes and next steps. Gonzalez Rogers expects the former to conclude by May 21<\/p>\n The jury will weigh in during the liability phase only, and its verdict will be advisory, which means Gonzalez Rogers will make the final decision. <\/p>\n \u2014CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/108300866-muskaltmansite1.jpg\")
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