Sam Altman took the stand today in defense against a lawsuit filed by his former co-founder Elon Musk, who is challenging OpenAI's corporate structure. When asked about Musk's claim that OpenAI's other founders "stole a charity" by creating a for-profit subsidiary to commercialize AI models, Altman expressed disbelief after a long pause. "We created one of the largest charities in the world," Altman said, referring to the OpenAI foundation, which now holds approximately $200 billion in assets. Musk's legal team pointed out that the foundation didn't have full-time employees until earlier this year, a delay OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor attributed to the difficulty of converting OpenAI equity to cash, which was resolved during the company's 2025 restructuring.
Musk's attorneys focused their questioning on whether OpenAI's safety commitments had been compromised as the company grew more commercially powerful. Altman pushed back by revealing concerns he had about Musk's own approach to safety during critical discussions in 2017, when founders were determining how to secure funding for AI development. Altman described a particularly unsettling moment when Musk was asked what would happen if he died while controlling a hypothetical OpenAI for-profit entity. According to Altman, Musk's response was that "Maybe OpenAI should pass to my children."
Altman testified that Musk's vision for controlling the for-profit arm troubled him because OpenAI's core mission was preventing advanced AI from falling under any single person's control. Drawing on his experience leading Y Combinator, Altman noted he had observed that "founders who had control usually did not give it up." Altman also criticized Musk's management style, arguing it was ineffective for running a research organization even though it may have succeeded in engineering and manufacturing companies. "I don't think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab," Altman stated, adding that Musk had "demotivated some of our most key researchers" and once demanded that chief scientists Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever create ranked lists of researchers based on their accomplishments.