Mira Murati Faces Musk Claims in OpenAI For-Profit Testimony
mira murati is not the witness at the center of this week’s testimony, but her name sits inside a dispute that now has a sharper date and a sharper claim. Greg Brockman told the court that Elon Musk began pushing OpenAI to go for-profit in mid-2017 while also seeking full control.
That account deepens the fight over who steered OpenAI away from its nonprofit start and why Musk left the board in February 2018. It also places his sworn denial that Tesla has concrete AGI plans beside years of evidence about how he talked about AI in public and in internal emails.
Musk and OpenAI in 2017
Musk co-founded OpenAI in December 2015 with Sam Altman and Brockman as a nonprofit, and the stated mission was to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. He pledged $1 billion and ultimately contributed $38 million.
In 2016 and 2017, Musk emailed NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to secure an early supercomputer for OpenAI and emphasized the nonprofit status. Brockman testified that the push changed in mid-2017, when Musk began pressing for a for-profit structure and wanted control over the company.
Brockman on control and cash
Brockman said Musk told him he needed $80 billion to build a city on Mars and that controlling OpenAI’s AI could help him raise that money. Internal memos in August 2017 recorded concerns from Brockman and Ilya Sutskever about Musk’s desire for control.
He also described an August 2017 meeting in which Musk said, “I decline,” then stood up, stormed around the table, tore a painting off the wall, and threatened to withhold funding. Later that year, while still on OpenAI’s board, Musk secretly recruited Andrej Karpathy to lead Tesla’s self-driving AI effort.
Sworn denial versus public claims
On March 4, 2026, Musk posted on X that Tesla would be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form. Less than eight weeks later, under oath in an Oakland federal courtroom, he answered “No.” when asked whether Tesla has any concrete plans to pursue AGI.
The record now leaves Musk with two competing versions of his AI role. He publicly cast Tesla as an AGI builder, and the trial evidence shows him pursuing influence over OpenAI’s structure and personnel at the same time.
The unresolved issue is whether the court treats those contradictions as evidence of motive or as isolated episodes in a broader boardroom fight. The next ruling that matters is how much weight the judge gives Brockman’s account of Musk’s push for control.
