It started as a shared vision. Now it's a federal trial.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to building artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. A decade later, they are facing off in a courtroom in Oakland, California, in what may be the most consequential tech lawsuit of the AI era. The proceedings have laid bare a bitter personal and ideological rift between two men who once believed they were building the same thing.
Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and company president Greg Brockman in 2024, alleging they broke their founding promise to keep the organization a nonprofit. His core grievance: he donated $38 million believing he was funding a public-interest project, only to watch it become an $800 billion commercial giant. "You can't just steal a charity," Musk repeated from the stand, where he testified over three days during the trial's first week. The turning point, he said, was learning that Microsoft was pouring $10 billion into OpenAI. "This is a bait and switch," he texted Altman at the time.
OpenAI's defense is blunt. The company has called Musk's allegations "baseless," and his own lawyers faced uncomfortable moments when it emerged that his AI company xAI uses OpenAI's models to train its own products, something Musk defended as "standard practice."
The rivalry runs deeper than legal filings. In February 2025, Musk led a $97.4 billion unsolicited bid to take over OpenAI, which Altman publicly rejected, offering to buy X (formerly Twitter) for $9.74 billion instead. Musk called Altman a "swindler." Altman said Musk is "not a happy person." Meanwhile, Altman has been backing companies that directly compete with Musk's own ventures, including a brain-computer interface startup that rivals Neuralink.
The stakes could not be higher. A Musk victory could trigger a major shake-up at OpenAI, potentially removing Altman as CEO and unwinding the company's restructuring, threatening its path to a trillion-dollar IPO. At the same time, Musk's own company xAI is eyeing a public offering at a target valuation of $1.75 trillion.
At its core, this is a fight about who controls the future of AI, and whether that future was ever meant to be profitable at all.
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