{"id":36343,"date":"2026-05-12T17:08:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T17:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/36343\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T17:08:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T17:08:10","slug":"sam-altman-testimony-musk-wanted-to-pass-openai-to-his-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/36343\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman Testimony: Musk Wanted to Pass OpenAI to His Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a> on Tuesday testified that Elon Musk<\/a> wanted “total control” of the ChatGPT maker \u2014 even saying he thought the AI startup should be passed on to his children.<\/p>\n

\n Loading audio narration…\n <\/p>\n

While on the witness stand, Altman described a “particularly hair-raising moment” when his OpenAI cofounders asked Musk, also a cofounder of the company, “If you have control what happens when you die?”<\/p>\n

Musk responded, according to Altman, “I haven’t thought about it a ton, but, you know, maybe it should just, the control should pass to my children.”<\/p>\n

Altman told the nine-person federal California jury that he “didn’t feel comfortable with that.”<\/p>\n

Altman’s testimony marked a pivotal point in the civil trial of Musk’s lawsuit<\/a> against his AI rival and OpenAI<\/a>, the company the pair founded together in 2015.<\/p>\n

Musk, who testified in the trial last month as the first witness, accused Altman and other OpenAI executives of stealing the “charity” they started.<\/p>\n

“Essentially, they’re trying to steal a charity, and we’re trying to stop them,” Musk told the jury.<\/p>\n

Musk, who left the firm in 2018, has alleged that he poured tens of millions into OpenAI to support its founding mission as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the public’s benefit, only for that mission to later be, in part, abandoned through the firm’s partnership with Microsoft<\/a>, also named as a defendant in his lawsuit.<\/p>\n

The outcome of the trial, now in its third week, could reshape the artificial intelligence landscape and cost OpenAI and its backer, Microsoft, billions in damages if Musk prevails.<\/p>\n

Altman’s testimony follows a roster of other tech heavyweights \u2014 including OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella<\/a> \u2014 who have already testified before the Oakland jury.<\/p>\n

In an X post ahead of jury selection in the case, OpenAI said Musk’s case “has always been a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday testified that Elon Musk wanted “total control” of the ChatGPT maker \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[16406,982,2876,17917,532,5211,10990,6964,320,15311,7844,157,22809,14644,22808],"class_list":["post-36343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-openai","tag-ai-rival","tag-altman","tag-child","tag-civil-trial","tag-company","tag-firm","tag-jury","tag-lawsuit","tag-microsoft","tag-mission","tag-musk","tag-openai","tag-openai-cofounder","tag-testimony","tag-total-control"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}