Sam Altman takes the stand in trial against Elon Musk

Sam Altman walked into a courtroom on May 12th and took an oath, and with that, the most elaborately performative feud in Silicon Valley history became subject to something neither man particularly enjoys: a structured, adversarial search for truth. The background is essential context. Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 alongside Altman and others, bringing early money and his then-considerable reputation as a technologist willing to think at civilisational scale. The organisation was structured as a nonprofit, its founding documents saturated with language about humanity's benefit, artificial general intelligence handled safely, no single commercial interest allowed to capture what was meant to be a collective good. Musk departed the board in 2018, the official explanation being conflicts with his own AI work at Tesla. The unofficial explanations have multiplied ever since. By 2024, Musk had filed suit against OpenAI and Altman, alleging that the company's deepening commercial relationship with Microsoft — and the structural shifts that accompanied it — constituted a betrayal of the nonprofit mission he believed he was funding. The lawsuit survived various legal challenges and kept moving toward trial. And now Altman is on the stand, answering questions under oath about what was promised, what was intended, and what actually happened to the organisation both men once claimed to care about for reasons beyond personal enrichment. That last part is where the testimony gets interesting, because both Musk and Altman have since built or backed competing AI ventures — Musk with xAI and Grok, Altman steering OpenAI through its transformation into something that looks considerably more like a conventional technology company than its founding documents imagined.

If confirmed as substantive testimony, what unfolds here matters in ways that extend well beyond two billionaires arguing about who was right. Altman's words under oath become a formal record of OpenAI's internal reasoning during its most consequential strategic decisions. If the testimony reveals that commercial considerations drove structural changes before the nonprofit framework was formally revised, that hands regulators, journalists, and rival organisations a document to cite for years. The Microsoft relationship — the billions in investment, the compute dependency, the licensing arrangements — gets examined not as a press-released partnership but as a legal fact pattern. For the broader AI industry, a ruling against OpenAI would establish that founding nonprofit commitments carry genuine legal weight, which would constrain how every mission-driven AI lab currently planning a commercial pivot structures its next move. For Musk, winning would be vindication of a narrative he has spent years constructing publicly. For Altman, the more pressing concern is what the cross-examination surfaces about the gap between OpenAI's public language and its internal decision-making — because that gap is where reputational damage lives, independent of the verdict.

Watch for partial rulings on the core nonprofit-mission claims, and for any internal OpenAI communications that Musk's legal team introduces as exhibits — those documents, if they surface in open court, will tell you more than the testimony itself.

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