Jury selection in the lawsuit Elon Musk filed against Sam Altman and Greg Brockman is scheduled to begin Monday, setting the stage for a trial about OpenAI’s origins and its present direction.
The suit, filed in August 2024, centers on OpenAI’s 2015 birth as a nonprofit start-up primarily funded by Musk, and accuses Altman and Brockman of double-crossing Musk by shifting the organization into a moneymaking mode behind his back. Musk is asking a court to force OpenAI to revert to a nonprofit, and to remove Altman and Brockman as officers; he also seeks Altman’s removal from OpenAI’s board.
The numbers underline what is at stake. OpenAI is now valued at $852bn, and the company’s rapid growth — which OpenAI calls the target of an “unfounded case of sour grapes” — has coincided with the emergence of Musk’s rival venture, xAI, launched in 2023. OpenAI says Musk’s lawsuit is intended to undercut its expansion and to bolster xAI.
The trial will be driven by a trove of internal material: thousands of pages of documents have been revealed in court and will be parsed by jurors and lawyers alike. Greg Brockman’s own 2017 diary entries are part of the record; in them he wrote, "This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon," and, "Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick?" The entries are central to Musk’s claim that OpenAI’s founders intentionally shifted course from their original nonprofit promise.
Context matters: at its founding in 2015 OpenAI presented itself as a nonprofit research lab. The core legal question in the case is whether the company, now a highly valued commercial entity, abandoned that founding mission when it moved toward profit-making structures. Legal teams and industry observers say the answer could reshape who controls OpenAI and what limits, if any, can be placed on how an AI lab funds and governs itself.
Tension in the story goes beyond corporate governance. Musk comes into this fight after a recent legal loss: a jury last month held him liable for defrauding investors in his $44bn takeover of Twitter in 2022. OpenAI’s leaders have dismissed the new lawsuit as sour grapes, while Musk insists the defendants secretly turned OpenAI into a business without his consent. At the same time, outside experts have begun to question OpenAI’s path forward amid surging financial needs and no articulated profit plan, and SpaceX — another Musk-linked company — plans to go public this summer in an initial public offering, raising broader questions about capital flows in the sector.
What happens next is procedural but consequential: if a jury accepts Musk’s central claims, the court could order structural changes at OpenAI and force leadership removals Musk seeks. If jurors reject his case, OpenAI’s current structure and executive team would likely remain intact, and Musk’s legal maneuver would be a costly public defeat. Either verdict will reverberate through the industry because the trial addresses who decides the rules for a technology that already carries enormous commercial value.
For Sam Altman, the man named in Musk’s complaint, the trial is a direct challenge to his leadership at the company he helped build. The jury convenes Monday to begin sorting documents, testimony and the competing narratives: a group of founders who became stewards of a fast-growing company, and an early funder who says they betrayed the terms under which that work began. The outcome will determine not just whether Altman stays in place, but whether OpenAI remains a commercial heavyweight valued at $852bn or is pushed back toward the nonprofit model Musk demands.
