Court testimony in Oakland, California has shed new light on tensions between Elon Musk and Sam Altman as a legal dispute over OpenAI’s origins and governance continues, with Musk accusing the company of straying from its original non-profit mission.
Altman, co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, told a federal jury that Musk repeatedly pushed for greater control of the organisation and supported a shift towards a more traditional for-profit structure capable of attracting large-scale investment. OpenAI, founded in 2015 as a non-profit artificial intelligence research lab, later adopted a capped-profit model to fund the development of increasingly advanced systems.
According to Altman, Musk explored multiple governance changes, including increasing board influence, taking on a leadership role, and even suggesting that OpenAI could operate under Tesla, his electric vehicle company, as part of a wider restructuring plan.
Altman described a discussion that raised concerns among co-founders, telling the court, “A particularly hair-raising moment was when my cofounders asked, ‘If you have control, what happens when you die?’ He said something like ‘…maybe it should pass to my children.'”
He suggested Musk viewed long-term control as something that could extend beyond his lifetime, while also linking governance to fundraising strength and public influence.
Altman also recalled Musk’s confidence in his ability to generate investor interest. “If I make one tweet about this, it’s instantly worth a ton,” Altman recalled Musk saying.
Despite these discussions, Altman said he and fellow co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever rejected the idea of granting Musk overarching authority, arguing that it would conflict with OpenAI’s founding principle that no single individual should control the development of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a term used to describe systems that could match or exceed human cognitive abilities.
Altman also referenced an email in which Musk reportedly said OpenAI had “a zero percent chance, not a one percent chance, of success” without his involvement, highlighting early disagreements over the organisation’s direction.
Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and stopped his financial contributions shortly afterwards. When offered the chance to invest during a 2019 restructuring into a for-profit subsidiary, Altman said Musk declined, reportedly stating he would not invest in companies he did not control.