Sam Altman sat in a federal courtroom in Oakland and told a judge he is an “honest and trustworthy business person.”
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO is seeking $130 billion in damages. The core allegation: OpenAI abandoned its founding nonprofit mission and became exactly the kind of profit-driven AI juggernaut it was created to prevent.
What Altman said on the stand
Altman’s testimony centered on a theme that should be familiar to anyone who has watched power struggles unfold at tech companies. He argued that OpenAI’s foundational principles were specifically designed so that no single person could exert control over the organization.
Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab in 2015. Musk departed from the organization in 2018, and in the years since, OpenAI has transformed into something that looks a lot more like a conventional tech giant than a charitable research institute.
Altman pushed back on Musk’s narrative during his testimony, refuting allegations that he had sought long-term control of OpenAI before Musk’s departure.
The nonprofit that outgrew its mission
OpenAI has been described in court as “the best-funded nonprofit in the history of mankind.”
The organization’s current valuation exceeds $850 billion. Calling something with an $850 billion price tag a “nonprofit” requires a fairly generous interpretation of the word.
OpenAI’s transition from a pure nonprofit to a capped-profit structure, and now toward what appears to be a more traditional corporate model, is the factual backbone of Musk’s complaint. He argues this wasn’t just mission drift. It was a betrayal of the founding agreement.
Altman’s defense rests on the idea that scaling AI safely requires enormous capital, and enormous capital requires structures that can attract investment.
Why this matters beyond the courtroom
OpenAI is building technology that will reshape industries, labor markets, and potentially the balance of geopolitical power. Who controls that technology, and under what governance framework, is not a trivial question.
If Musk prevails, or even partially prevails, it could force a restructuring of how OpenAI operates. That has downstream implications for Microsoft, which has invested billions into the company, and for every business building on top of OpenAI’s models.
The $130 billion damage figure is almost certainly aspirational. Courts rarely award amounts that large, and Musk’s legal team would need to demonstrate harm at a scale that’s difficult to quantify.
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