OpenAI President Greg Brockman confessed under oath his previously unreported stake in the ChatGPT maker is worth more than $20 billion—and closer to $30 billion—despite investing zero dollars into the company, during his testimony on Monday for the high-stakes court trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI.
Sam Altman, right, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, center, arrive at the U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif., Thursday, April 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)
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When asked by Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo if his stake in OpenAI was closer to $30 billion, Brockman responded: “I think that may be true, yes.”
Musk’s team presented an email from 2015 in which Brockman wrote to then-CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer that he would personally be donating $100,000 to OpenAI, but Brockman testified he never ended up donating that.
Musk’s team also presented an email chain from 2017 showing that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had compensated Brockman with a $10 million stake in Altman’s family office for his work at OpenAI—an arrangement that could make Brockman develop a “greater allegiance toward Sam,” Musk’s adviser Jared Birchall wrote.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company by Altman, Brockman and Musk, among several others.
“Financially what will take me to $1B?" Brockman wrote in a September 2017 diary entry, according to documents unsealed as part of the lawsuit. Musk's lawyers used Brockman’s diary entries in court on Monday to argue Brockman was driven by financial incentives rather than OpenAI's founding nonprofit mission to develop safe AI for humanity's benefit. In a separate 2017 entry, Brockman wrote: "It all comes down to the money. We can get it from Tesla, probably. We could also probably get it from Google."
The cofounders' motivations sit at the center of the lawsuit Musk filed in 2024, which alleges Musk was defrauded of his early $38 million donation and accuses OpenAI of abandoning its original mission in pursuit of profits. Brockman was chief technology officer of financial services platform Stripe before leaving in 2015 to cofound OpenAI and serve as CTO (the company initially operated out of his living room). Brockman has long been seen as a loyal ally of Altman’s: When Altman was ousted from OpenAI by its board members, Brockman was removed from OpenAI's board and briefly departed before returning alongside Altman days later.
$852 billion. That’s OpenAI’s valuation as of March thanks to a $122 billion funding round from investors including Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank and Microsoft. Based on OpenAI’s most recent valuation, Brockman has a 2.5% to 3% stake in the company. The firm is gearing up for an initial public offering that could happen as early as late 2026 that could value the firm at up to $1 trillion.
During Monday’s testimony, Brockman also acknowledged that his personal equity in AI chipmaker Cerebras likely gained value after OpenAI inked a $10 billion chip-purchasing agreement with the company in January. Cerebras's valuation jumped from $8 billion last September to $23 billion thanks to a funding round announced in February. In April, OpenAI reportedly expanded the commitment and took an equity stake worth a total $20 billion. On Monday, Cerebras filed to go public at a valuation of up to $26.6 billion. Musk's legal team has pressed Brockman on potential conflicts of interest in his outside investments, using the Cerebras admission as a concrete example to support its central allegation that OpenAI's leadership has personally benefited from corporate decisions made under the umbrella of a nonprofit mission. Brockman also testified his stakes in Stripe, CoreWeave and Helion—all of which have deals with OpenAI.
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