OpenAI president Greg Brockman testified in 2026 about the dramatic moment Elon Musk left the organization’s early leadership, describing a tense August 2017 meeting in which Musk demanded full control of a planned for-profit subsidiary — and stormed out when the other co-founders refused.
According to Brockman’s account, Musk had given each co-founder a Tesla Model 3 shortly before the meeting, which Brockman interpreted as an attempt to win their support. When told the group would not grant him unequivocal control, Musk went quiet, then stood up and walked around the table. “I thought he was going to hit me,” Brockman testified. Musk grabbed a painting — a canvas depicting a Tesla that researcher Ilya Sutskever had commissioned as a goodwill gesture — and turned back to ask, “When will you be departing OpenAI?”
Neither Brockman nor Sutskever left. Musk stopped his regular donations to the organization and departed the board voluntarily in February 2018, stating that “OpenAI is on a path of certain failure” and that he intended to focus on AI at Tesla. He continued paying for office space shared with Neuralink until 2020.
The testimony is part of an ongoing trial stemming from a lawsuit Musk filed in 2024 against his former co-founders, Sam Altman and Brockman. Musk’s legal team argues that Altman and Brockman “stole a charity,” while OpenAI’s lawyers contend Musk had the same for-profit ambitions. The dispute centers on OpenAI’s 2019 conversion to a for-profit structure, which it used to raise $1 billion from Microsoft — and a further $13 billion in subsequent years.
Brockman testified for two days, at times referencing a personal journal. His current stake in OpenAI is worth approximately $30 billion, according to his own testimony. The nonprofit arm of OpenAI now holds over $150 billion in equity value, Brockman said. The trial is expected to continue through the following week.
Source: TechCrunch