

What’s Next in the Elon Musk Megatrial Against OpenAI and Sam Altman
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The second week of a blockbuster trial between Elon Musk and Sam Altman kicks off Monday, with the future of OpenAI very much up for grabs.OpenAI President Greg Brockman is expected to testify Monday, the next star witness in a revolving cast of some of the most important leaders in AI.Over three days of testimony and cross-examination last week, Musk sought to make his case to nine jurors that he was manipulated by OpenAI and Altman into giving $38 million to a nonprofit, only for the startup to turn it into a for-profit venture.The Tesla and SpaceX owner is asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their leadership roles at OpenAI, damages of up to $180 billion to be paid out from OpenAI’s for-profit arm to its nonprofit parent, and an unwinding of the company’s recent conversion to a more traditional corporate governance structure.If even one of these remedies is granted, it could change the course of OpenAI and the rest of the artificial-intelligence industry with it.Musk’s attorneys have pointed to private journal entries written by Brockman, obtained as part of legal discovery, to support the argument that the OpenAI founders were secretly plotting about the company’s for-profit structure.“We’ve been thinking that maybe we should just flip to a for profit,” Brockman allegedly wrote in a private journal entry in 2017.
“Making the money for us sounds great and all.”He later said in a recorded deposition in September that the entry in question was “a reference to having some sort of a revenue plan…in order to pursue the mission” of OpenAI.As Brockman takes the stand, it is expected that Musk’s legal team will reference those personal notes to support Musk’s perspective that
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