Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in December 2015 as a nonprofit meant to ensure artificial general intelligence would benefit all of humanity. Less than eight weeks later, he was telling Tesla executives that Tesla would be one of the companies to make AGI.
The shift is at the center of the Musk v. Altman trial, where testimony this week painted a picture of a founder who helped launch OpenAI with a pledged $1 billion, contributed $38 million, and then pushed for more control as the company moved from idealistic startup to strategic prize.
Greg Brockman testified that Musk began pressing OpenAI to go for-profit in mid-2017, after previously helping the company secure resources and compute. Brockman also said Musk told him he needed $80 billion to build a city on Mars and that control of OpenAI’s AI could help him raise that money. Internal memos from August 2017, Brockman said, captured concerns from him and Ilya Sutskever about Musk’s desire for control.
The testimony described a boardroom fight that turned physical in tone if not in force. When an equity discussion did not go Musk’s way in August 2017, Brockman said Musk answered, “I decline,” stood up and stormed around the table. Brockman testified that Musk tore a painting off the wall, stormed out and threatened to withhold funding. The words heard in that room now sit in sharp contrast to the public image Musk later presented of a clean separation over Tesla’s AI work.
That contrast matters because Musk later framed his departure from OpenAI as a conflict of interest with Tesla, while the trial evidence points to a different explanation: he left after failing to secure the CEO role. Musk resigned from OpenAI’s board in February 2018, months after secretly recruiting Andrej Karpathy in late 2017 to lead Tesla’s self-driving AI effort. He also sent a 2017 email to a Tesla vice president saying, “The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me. But it had to be done.”
The case is now in its second week, and the testimony is exposing not just Musk’s early role in building OpenAI but the contradictions in how he has described his own AI ambitions. On March 4, 2026, Musk posted on X that Tesla would be one of the companies to make AGI; less than eight weeks later, he told an Oakland federal courtroom under oath that Tesla had no concrete plans to pursue it. What remains for the jury is not whether Musk cared about AI. It is whether he wanted OpenAI to serve a mission, or his leverage.