Elon Musk told a federal jury on Tuesday that his lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders is not about him. “It is not okay to steal a charity, that’s my view,” Musk said from the witness stand in Oakland, California, in his first testimony under oath in the case he filed in 2024. “If we make it okay to loot a charity, the entire foundation of charitable giving in America will be destroyed. That’s my concern.” Musk said that if Altman and Brockman “get away with what they did, this case will become case law and become precedent to looting every charity in America.” The framing was deliberate. Musk’s legal strategy depends on making nine jurors believe that a fight between three billionaires over the control of the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence company is actually a fight about whether American charitable institutions can trust that their missions will be honoured. “Fundamentally, I think they’re going to try to make this lawsuit very complicated,” Musk told the jury, “but it’s actually very simple.” That is not true. Nothing about this case is simple. But the question of whether the jury accepts Musk’s simplicity or OpenAI’s complexity will determine whether the most valuable startup in history is forced to unwind the for-profit conversion that made it worth $852 billion.

The testimony

Musk took the stand as the trial’s first witness, immediately after a 20-minute recess following opening statements. His lawyer Steven Molo had already told the jury that “without Elon Musk, there would be no OpenAI, pure and simple” and that OpenAI’s leadership “enriched themselves, made themselves more powerful, and breached the very basic principles on which the charity was founded.” Molo used a museum analogy: a nonprofit can open a gift shop, but “the museum store can’t loot the museum and sell the Picassos.” On the stand, Musk’s task was narrower. He needed to establish himself not as a competitor with a grievance but as a donor who was deceived. His lawsuit claims he was “assiduously manipulated” and “deceived” by promises to “chart a safer, more open course than profit-driven tech giants.” The roughly $44 million he donated to OpenAI, according to Musk’s legal theory, formed a charitable trust that required the organisation to remain a nonprofit. The for-profit conversion completed in October 2025 violated that trust.

Musk has renounced any personal financial benefit from the case. Any damages awarded, up to $134 billion in wrongful gains, would flow to OpenAI’s nonprofit foundation rather than to Musk personally. He is also seeking the removal of Altman from the board and from his role as chief executive, the removal of Brockman as president, and a court order unwinding the for-profit restructuring. The renunciation of personal benefit is legally strategic: it neutralises OpenAI’s argument that the lawsuit is motivated by competitive jealousy and positions Musk as acting in the public interest rather than his own. Whether the jury accepts that positioning given the credibility questions that have surrounded Musk throughout this litigation, including the timing of his lawsuit relative to the founding of his own AI company xAI, is the central question of the trial’s liability phase.

The defence

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Before Musk testified, William Savitt delivered OpenAI’s opening statement. His argument was blunt: “We are here because Mr. Musk didn’t get his way at OpenAI. He quit, saying they would fail for sure. But my clients had the nerve to go on and succeed without him.” Savitt told the jury that in OpenAI’s early years, Musk expressed support for a for-profit structure, with himself in charge. He said Musk used his funding promises to bully founding members and attempted to merge OpenAI with Tesla in 2017. “The other founders refused to turn the keys of artificial intelligence over to one person,” Savitt said. “One person having control wasn’t consistent with OpenAI’s mission.” Savitt showed the jury an email from former board member Shivon Zilis describing two for-profit restructuring options that were presented to Musk. “He supported a for-profit, so long as he was in control,” Savitt argued. He claimed Musk “never expressed the view that OpenAI had to remain purely nonprofit, or even that he thought it should be.”

The two narratives are structurally incompatible. Musk’s narrative requires the jury to believe he donated $44 million to a nonprofit AI safety project and was betrayed when its leaders converted it into a profit machine without his consent. OpenAI’s narrative requires the jury to believe Musk always wanted a for-profit, tried to take personal control, failed, quit, and now uses the legal system to damage a competitor to his own AI company. The Zilis email is the pivotal piece of evidence. If it shows Musk supporting for-profit restructuring, it undermines his charitable trust claim. If it shows Musk insisting on personal control as a condition, it supports OpenAI’s narrative but also shows that restructuring was being discussed with Musk’s participation, which complicates the “stolen” framing. Musk’s legal team will argue that discussing options is not the same as consenting to the specific conversion that occurred. OpenAI’s team will argue that participation in restructuring discussions is inconsistent with a belief that the nonprofit structure was inviolable.

The stakes

The trial’s outcome has immediate commercial consequences. OpenAI is approaching a trillion-dollar valuation and planning what would be one of the largest initial public offerings in history. A ruling that the for-profit conversion was unlawful could force the company to unwind the October restructuring, return assets to the nonprofit, and potentially delay or derail the IPO. Musk’s filing states: “Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon, and in just eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity.” The trial is expected to last three weeks. Musk and Altman are each scheduled for more than two hours of testimony. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will testify for approximately one hour. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder who briefly ousted Altman in November 2023, will appear for 30 minutes. Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer, will appear via videotaped deposition.

The advisory jury will deliver a verdict on liability that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has said she will “likely” follow. If liability is established, a remedies phase beginning around May 18 will determine whether the court orders financial restitution, executive removal, structural reversion, or some combination. The judge, sitting in equity, has sole authority over structural remedies. The jury can only advise on monetary damages. This structure matters because Musk’s most consequential request, the forced reversion to nonprofit status, is entirely in the judge’s hands regardless of what the jury decides. OpenAI’s $110 billion funding round in February, which valued the company at $852 billion and included $50 billion from Amazon, was predicated on the for-profit structure remaining intact. A court order unwinding that structure would not merely embarrass OpenAI. It would call into question the legal basis of every investment made since the conversion, including commitments from Amazon, Microsoft, SoftBank, and Nvidia that collectively exceed $200 billion. Musk told the jury the case is simple. The consequences are anything but.