How Elon Musk left OpenAI, according to Greg Brockman

In late August 2017, key figures from OpenAI (then a small, non-profit research institute) met to discuss creating a for-profit entity to commercialize the technology and raise the funds needed to make AGI a reality.

Elon Musk has demanded full control of the company and has just given each of his co-founders a Tesla Model 3. CTO Greg Brockman said he saw this as a way to butter up Musk and Sam Altman at a time when they are competing to gain support for their respective visions for the company’s future. Ilya Sutskever, head of research at OpenAI, commissioned a Tesla painting from Musk during the meeting as a friendly gesture.

The conversation did not follow that tone. Musk said Brockman became upset and angry when he was told that others would not accept his demands for control of the company. He sat and thought quietly for a few minutes.

Then, in response to Brockman’s words, Musk said, “I refuse.” The SpaceX and Tesla founder “got up and rushed around the table…I thought he was going to hit me. He grabbed the painting and started running out of the room. Then he turned around and said, ‘When are you going to leave OpenAI?'”

Brockman and Sutskever have not left or committed to Musk’s vision. Musk had stopped making regular contributions to the company’s operating budget and was scheduled to leave the board within six months. However, the company paid for the office space it shared with Neuralink until 2020.

As today’s legal battle over OpenAI’s future unfolds, scrutiny has come over a key period in 2017 when the organization’s original co-founders disagreed over who would control OpenAI’s future, ultimately leading to Musk filing a lawsuit against the co-founders.

We haven’t heard from Sam Altman yet, but OpenAI Chairman Greg Brockman spent two days testifying, frequently referencing his personal diaries that provide rare insight into what it’s like to be a 30-year-old tech executive in the midst of a heated battle with Elon Musk.

“It’s very distressing,” Brockman said of the publicity for the journal. “It’s a very personal piece of writing that the world will never see, (but) there’s nothing in it for me to be ashamed of,” he said.

The intense negotiations between startup founders are rarely shared publicly, especially when the companies are changing the world as much as OpenAI.

We recently got a taste of this criticism when OpenAI’s lawyers shared a text message Musk sent to Brockman two days before the trial began: “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so be it.”

The jury can’t see the note, but Musk’s lawyers did their best to get its spirit. They’re trying to show the court that Altman and Brockman “stole charity,” and OpenAI’s legal team is trying to show that Musk had exactly the same plan in mind.

The inciting event for all of this was when an OpenAI model beat the best human player in the video game DOTA II. Brockman convinced everyone in the organization that computing was a key resource for creating powerful AI tools, but he said raising money purely as a non-profit was not enough.

This led to talk of a for-profit subsidiary that Musk wanted to have “clear” control over, at least initially. Other founders said they offered equal stakes and offered larger stakes commensurate with their cash investments. Another idea on the table was to somehow connect OpenAI to Tesla’s AI efforts. Shivon Zilis, an OpenAI advisor who acted as an intermediary between Musk and the team there, said there were more than 20 variations of the plan.

But their partnership fell apart when the other founders refused to give Musk control.

“There should not be one person with complete and absolute control over OpenAI,” Brockman testified. Brockman and Sutskever discussed plans to oust Elon from the OpenAI board to move forward, resulting in a November 2017 journal entry that Musk’s lawyers focused on.

‘(C)can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very unpleasant fight,’ Brockman wrote. ‘(I’m) just thinking about the office and we’re in the office. And his story ultimately is that we haven’t been honest with him about how we still want to work for profit without him… . But another realization from this is that stealing non-profits from him is wrong. Converting to a b-corp without him. That would be quite morally bankrupt. And he’s really not stupid.”

The phrase “stealing non-profits” may seem scary, but the context, according to Brockman, was whether or not to kick Musk off the board. They ended up not doing that. In February 2018, Musk decided that “Open AI is on a sure path to failure” and voluntarily left the board of directors, saying he planned to focus more on AI at Tesla.

Brockman described his reflection as an effort to determine whether he was satisfied with his work life.

“This is our only chance to get away from Elon,” he wrote during the meeting. “Is he the ‘glorious leader’ I would choose? We really have a chance to make this happen. How can we make a billion dollars financially?”

Musk’s lawyers took the final reflections as a sign that Brockman was thinking more about his personal wealth than the nonprofit’s mission. Brockman said the company’s stake is now worth nearly $30 billion. This gave Musk’s main trial lawyer, Steve Molo, an opportunity to rebuke him.

“Why didn’t you take $29 billion, more than the $1 billion you said you would like, and give it to charity?” Molo demanded.

“Look at what we have accomplished.” Brockman answered. “The OpenAI Nonprofit has over $150 billion in OpenAI equity value, something we have built with our hard work, blood, sweat and tears since Elon left.”

Molo also detailed an email in which Brockman said he would donate $100,000 to OpenAI. Ironically, Brockman may be best known to the public for making the largest donation of the 2025 political cycle. That means donating $25 million to MAGA Inc., a SuperPAC supporting President Donald Trump. However, this was not mentioned at trial.

Molo ridiculed Brockman’s account of alleged meetings involving control of the company, calling Musk “mean” to Brockman and suggesting that Brockman did not understand governance issues in the same way as Musk, a serial entrepreneur.

But Brockman said Musk doesn’t understand AI. “He didn’t know AI, he doesn’t know,” he testified, explaining that Musk dismissed an early demonstration of the software that would become ChatGPT. “We didn’t think he would actually spend the time necessary to get good at it.”

“The fact that Elon saw a very early version of the research that really set this all in motion, but didn’t recognize the spark, was the kind of thing that was important not to happen in this very environment,” Brockman said.

In 2019, OpenAI will form a for-profit company and use it to raise $1 billion from Microsoft. The company will raise an additional $13 billion from software giants over the next four years to grow into a leading AI frontier lab. It also gave a boost to the net worth of the company’s executives and employees, as well as the assets held by OpenAI, a non-profit organization.

And ultimately, these deals fueled Musk’s suspicions that Altman and Brockman were in control, leading him to file a lawsuit in 2024. The trial is expected to continue into next week.