Business

because he said, essentially, he saw no path at OpenAI and was going to work on AGI at Tesla. But during a Q&A period, he said that he wasn’t going to work on safety, and just focus on catching up with DeepMind. That generated a strong, negative reaction.

Every email to Musk starts with glowing compliments, and at times what even reads like groveling. I don’t know if the jury is noticing this, but I certainly am. I wonder how much ass-kissing Musk is accustomed to — probably a lot.

Some more successfully than others. While I’m willing to believe the “steal the charity” line is about booting Musk from the board, the idea that “making the money for us sounds great and all” was about unsuccessful fundraising was somewhat less believable. One thing Brockman is making clear is that Musk was mercurial — not a surprise. “Elon’s engagement depended directly on how likely he thought it was we’d succeed,” he says. By January 31st, 2018, Musk says he thought OpenAI was “on a path of certain failure relative to Google” in an email.

“Ilya and myself” decided not to remove him from the board because it felt right for the mission but wrong personally. By that point, Musk was trying to get them all to join Tesla. This makes the journal entry about “Ilya feeling like we morally should not be kicking elon out, and should be trying to make the non-profit work” as well as “it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him” read really differently.

Greg Brockman is explaining that Musk put conditions on his continuing donations at OpenAI, which he did not accept. Then Musk said they should merge OAI into Tesla. They’d get the money, a billion-dollar-per-year budget, and it’d grow from there. The work would have to be secret — that would be a requirement to make it happen.

“I truly thought he was going to physically attack me.” Musk was angry that no one wanted to agree for him to have majority equity. As he was storming out of the meeting, Musk asked Brockman and Sutskever when they planned to leave OpenAI. They were confused. Then Musk said, “I will withhold funding until you decide what you are going to do.” He then stopped his promised quarterly donations to OpenAI.

Brockman is discussing an intense period of negotiations between him, Ilya Sutskever, Sam Altman, and Musk. Musk wanted unilateral control. He also wanted a lot of equity because “he needed the money for Mars, he needed $80 billion to create a city there,” Brockman says. During the negotiations, Musk stopped his quarterly donations.

between Altman, Musk, Brockman, and Sutskever in August 2017. It was the first proposal for a for-profit. Musk rejected this. “At the end of the meeting he said, ‘You guys are great but I could start another AI company tomorrow. One tweet is all it takes,” Brockman said.

He started keeping it in 2010. He describes it as stream-of-thought, jotted notes, and disorganized thoughts that sometimes contradicted each other. “It’s very painful” to see the journal in this case, Brockman says. These were “very deeply personal writings that were never meant for the world to see but there’s nothing there I’m ashamed of.”

Musk told Brockman he tried to get Gates to donate four times, and Gates didn’t so much as come by the office. One wonders whether Musk’s persistent shit-talking of Gates had anything to do with Gates’ reluctance.

I love a sidebar. We have static. There’s some evidence OpenAI is trying to introduce that Musk’s team apparently doesn’t want, about Brockman’s investment in Cerebras.

Five to 10 people were laid off after Musk demanded a list of people with their contributions by their names. It had a “significantly negative” impact on morale and made recruiting more difficult.

Elon Musk requested that they come help. “It was pretty clear this was not something we could say no to,” Brockman says. Brockman claims this was something he worried about when it came to joining OpenAI.

We have some matters to take care of before we get the jury back.

GameStop wants to buy eBay, but is there a bigger deal brewing?

Just before they left, Jared Birchall’s testimony regarding the funding of the bid to buy OpenAI — the subject of last week’s drama — was struck.

In Brockman’s telling, Altman was around a lot more often than Musk. The gee-whiz energy here is off the charts, including a pre-launch story about the group being stuck in traffic for an hour and a half and not noticing because they were having such a good time.

From Sutskever’s texts to Brockman:

When Brockman was leaving Stripe, he told Altman “I’m thinking about doing an AI thing” and Altman said, “I’m also thinking about doing an AI thing” and “then we kept in touch.” They went to a dinner in Menlo Park — Musk arrived an hour late — to talk about AGI, then Brockman caught a ride home with Altman.

Asked what he does as president of OpenAI, that’s how Brockman responded. God I hate hearing millennial slang in the courtroom. Sooo I did a thing… for $30 billion.

“We very much have these AI models that are smart and capable but they’re not fully connected to the world,” Brockman says. “We as society are still figuring out how do we integrate these.” This is lol and also lmao.

When Musk left OpenAI he told Brockman that he was going to start an AGI competitor within Tesla. “The most important thing was that there was going to be a counterweight to Google/Deepmind,” Brockman said. Musk said there was “no hope — zero percent chance” at OpenAI. Musk also told Brockman that the work on AGI at Tesla would be secret because “the shareholders wouldn’t like it.”

Curious to see what they can recover from this testimony.

Look, correcting lawyers on whether they’ve dropped an article and saying things like “all those words are accurate so far” probably plays in a lot of places but this nitpicking doesn’t really cover you in glory in a courtroom. I get it! I am also obnoxious! But this kind of quibbling doesn’t help Brockman recover from the journal entries that make him look unreliable.

Cerebras, Stripe, CoreWeave, and Helion all appear on his financial disclosures. All four have deals with OpenAI. I see where this is going — probably a preview of what to expect with Altman.

It happened. Kind of a nothingburger, as Brockman said that the deal was “not really my focus area.” We are now back in his disclosures. OpenAI did a December 2025 deal with Cerebras, for $10 billion of chips — and Brockman had an investment. The deal increased Cerebras’ valuation to $23 billion. “Your equity in Cerebras became more valuable because of the transaction OpenAI did?” Brockman admits that’s possible.

But Brockman is back on the stand, and boy, morning has not been good to him. We are now moving on to Microsoft.

You may recall from Musk’s testimony that OpenAI has used purple boxes to highlight things. We see another purple box in OpenAI LLC’s announcement it exists. Molo asks if this is something OpenAI generally uses in its paperwork to highlight important things. Brockman says no. We go back and forth on this for a while, because Brockman thinks Molo’s statement is overly broad.

Brockman is worth $30 billion. Molo has been asking, over and over, why Brockman hasn’t donated the $29 billion to OpenAI’s charity since he’d be good at $1 billion. Brockman has been making weird non-answers. He sounds nervous and not especially convincing.

The famous Brockman quote has finally hit. Molo is arguing that rather than figuring out funding for the nonprofit, Brockman was plotting to get rich. Brockman is trying to say that there’s more context. While Molo is getting worked up, Brockman is pretty level. “Do we accept Elon’s terms, or do we reject the terms, he quits to create his own [AI company], and then we create our own [AI company]?” Molo tried to strike the answer, but he is overruled.

Greg Brockman’s journal really is making Greg Brockman look unreliable. Six days after telling Musk that Brockman et al. wanted more results in the nonprofit and to fundraise there, he writes, “We’ve been thinking about that maybe we should just flip to a for-profit. making money for us sounds great and all.” Brockman says this was an expression of a frustration and not a plan. Molo asks if he rehearsed that. Brockman says “no.”

He also writes, “To convert to a b-corp without him. That’d be pretty morally bankrupt.” That’s probably the most solid thing the Musk team has gotten out during the trial so far.

Molo asks if the nonprofit should still be a philanthropic endeavor. Brockman says, forcefully, “no.” We then look at notes from his diary, where he records Musk as saying “gotta figure out how do we transition from non-profit or something which is essentially philanthropic endeavor and is b-corp or c-corp.” Does make Brockman look pretty shifty.

We are hearing a lot of “I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” “I’m not sure I’d say it that way,” and “This sounds like something that I wrote, is it okay if we see it in context?” It’s not as contentious or tense as Musk’s exchanges with Savitt, but it’s definitely notable.

The question is whether Brockman disclosed his ownership of Cerebras when OpenAI was discussing merging with it. Brockman told Teller and Zilis, who were in theory Musk’s chiefs of staff, but not Musk himself. Molo is driving this home, which… I am less convinced by. Lots of executives delegate.

Musk’s team is finally landing some serious blows — namely that part of Brockman’s compensation was a grant from Altman’s family office. Musk’s adviser Jared Birchall wrote, “Greg is going to have a greater allegiance toward Sam as a result of this arrangement.” Brockman told Musk that “We ran out of YC stock fulfilling others’ offers” so Altman arranged the deal.

At a dinner about AI that Brockman and Altman attended, Musk was late. The first thing Brockman remembers Musk asking is, “Is Demis Hassabis evil?” Hassabis, of course, ran DeepMind.

It was initially supposed to be part of Y Combinator, as a research arm. Looking at a solicitation email from Brockman to then-CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer, Brockman writes that donors include Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel. “I’m personally donating $100,000,” he writes. But he didn’t end up donating that. Brockman is speaking very quickly and very softly, and YGR has just scolded him for it.

Brockman is taking the stand next.