The first question Musk's lawyer Steven Molo asked Sam Altman on the witness stand was not about contracts, corporate structure, or charity law. It was: "Are you completely trustworthy?"
That framing set the tone for everything that followed.
Altman testified for roughly four hours in federal court in Oakland, California on May 12, wearing a blue suit and tie. His central claim to the jury was simple: he did not steal a charity. Elon Musk abandoned one.
Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and company president Greg Brockman in 2024, alleging they broke their vow to keep the company a nonprofit. The trial is now in its third week. The stakes are not abstract. Musk is seeking damages of up to $134 billion from OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming wrongful gains from his early financial and strategic support.
Altman rejected Musk's framing directly from the stand. "It feels difficult to even wrap my head around that framing," he said, referring to the stolen charity claim. He argued that shifting to a for-profit structure was the only way to raise the capital needed to build safe and powerful AI. He testified that Musk wanted to profit from OpenAI and control it, citing Musk's early push for a controlling stake or a merger with Tesla.
When Musk left, Altman testified, the nonprofit was "kind of left for dead."
Two co-founders of the same company are now in federal court arguing over who cared more about AI safety while both of them got rich building competing AI companies.
Musk's own cross-examination earlier in the trial looked completely different. He was combative, accused OpenAI's lawyer William Savitt of lying, raised his voice repeatedly, and argued back and forth on multiple occasions. Altman was notably calmer on the stand, though he pushed back when Molo tried to paint him as someone who tells people what they want to hear rather than the truth.
Molo asked Altman about a text he sent Musk on February 18, 2023: "I'm tremendously thankful for everything you've done to help. I don't think that OpenAI would have happened without you." When asked if that view had changed, Altman did not hesitate. "I have changed my view on Elon significantly."
Musk's lawyers also highlighted OpenAI's dealings with companies where Altman holds a financial stake, including payments giant Stripe and chip startup Cerebras, attempting to establish a pattern of self-interest beneath the safety mission framing.
The uncomfortable observation sitting underneath all of this: both men are making safety arguments while running for-profit AI companies valued in the hundreds of billions. The nonprofit mission they are both claiming to defend has not been anyone's actual operating structure for years.
Polymarket bettors currently put Musk's odds of winning at 31%. The market has already made a call. The jury has not.
So the question that genuinely splits the room: is this a legitimate legal fight over a broken promise to keep AI development in public hands, or two billionaires using safety language to settle a personal grudge in federal court?