Sam Altman testifies in landmark OpenAI trial, says Musk wanted control of company

OpenAI Group PBC co-founder and Chief Executive Sam Altman faced the witness stand today in the high-stakes trial that could determine the future of the company.

Elon Musk is suing the company and its leaders, alleging that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman betrayed the founding mission to serve humanity by turning a non-profit into a money-making venture. Musk wants Altman replaced as CEO, and up to $180 billion in damages to be paid to from the nonprofit arm of OpenAI to come from the for-profit arm.

OpenAI has hit back, saying Musk seeks revenge in a market where he has become a competitor with his company, xAI. In his testimony today, Altman outright denied that Musk ever opposed turning OpenAI into a for-profit company. “Quite the opposite,” Altman said. When asked by his lawyer if he’d stolen a charity, his reply was: “It feels difficult to even wrap my head around that framing.”

“An early number that Mr. Musk threw out was that he should have 90% of the equity to start,” Altman went on. “It then softened, but it always was a majority.” Altman claimed that Musk’s argument to support his huge stake was simply that he was the “most well-known.” Altman testified that he was further made “uncomfortable” when Musk told him after his death, he might pass the company onto his children.

Altman also claimed Musk had done “huge damage to the culture” of the AI lab by ranking engineers and scientists. He explained, “For a research lab where people need psychological safety and long periods of time to pursue an idea, this idea that you constantly have to show your results, and if they’re not good enough for a short period of time you’re gonna get fired, that really didn’t work for the kind of research we went on to successfully do.”

Altman claimed Musk resigned in 2018 because he’d lost faith that the company would ever be successful, saying in an email that it would never be “serious counterweight” to Google LLC’s DeepMind AI research lab, evidence that was presented in court.

When cross-examined by Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo he denied he had fostered “toxic culture of lying.” The accusation had come from testimony by a former OpenAI board member and several former OpenAI officials. “I believe I am an honest and trustworthy businessperson,” Altman said, denying he had misled anyone in the company.

In reference to being kicked off the board of OpenAI in 2023 when he was accused by board members of not consistently being “candid” with them, Altman returned that there were “misunderstandings and a breakdown of trust,” but he was “not trying to deceive the board.”

Molo also prodded Altman about his stakes in other ventures – that he owned about a third of the nuclear-energy startup Helion Energy, Inc., worth in the region of $1.6 billion, a company that is to provide electricity in the future to power OpenAI’s data centers. Molo went on, pressing Altman about a potential conflict of interest regarding his substantial investment in the social media company, Reddit, as well as other ventures that are currently being investigated by a House Oversight Committee.

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