Musk was considering handing OpenAI to his children, Altman testified

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman finally took the stand this morning to defend himself against a lawsuit filed by his former founder Elon Musk that challenges OpenAI’s corporate structure.

Altman was asked out of the gate what he thought of Musk’s claim that the other OpenAI founders “stole a charity” when they launched a for-profit subsidiary to market products based on the company’s AI models.

“It’s hard to even wrap my head around that frame,” Altman said after several seconds of silence. “We have created one of the largest charities in the world. This foundation does amazing work and will do so much more.”

Musk’s lawyers have been at pains to point out that the OpenAI Foundation, which now has $200 billion in assets, did not have full-time employees until earlier this year. OpenAI Chairman Brett Taylor testified today, and that was simply because of the challenge of converting OpenAI stock into cash, which was accomplished through the organization’s recent restructuring in 2025.

The central question Musk’s lawyers are asking is whether the company’s commitment to safety has been neglected as its commercial power has grown. But Altman said that in 2017, during… Pivotal period As the founders grappled with how to get funding to power their AI models, Musk’s specific plans for safety “concerned me.”

He described a “particularly disturbing moment” in the discussion when Musk was asked what would happen if he died while controlling the for-profit hypothetical company OpenAI. In Altman’s narration, Musk said, “Maybe OpenAI should pass on to my kids.”

Altman said Musk’s focus on controlling initial profit gave him pause because OpenAI was dedicated to keeping advanced AI out of one person’s hands, and Altman, with his experience running prominent startup accelerator Y Combinator, knew that “founders who have control usually don’t give it up.”

Altman also testified that Musk’s management methods, which may have worked in engineering and manufacturing, did not work at OpenAI.

“I don’t think Mr. Musk understands how to run a good research lab,” Altman said. “He discouraged some of our principal researchers. At one point he had Greg and Elijah prepare a list of researchers and list their accomplishments, rank them, and rank them with a chainsaw. This did serious damage to the culture of the organization for a long time.”

In fact, Altman portrayed himself as advocating “stressful equality” for fellow founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, the two people who were actually running OpenAI at the time while Musk and Altman worked in other jobs.

After this conflict remained unresolved, Musk eventually left the OpenAI board and began competing with Tesla’s AI initiatives and his own AI startup xAI. But Altman kept in touch with the volatile entrepreneur, updating him on the latest developments in OpenAI’s work and asking for his funding and advice.

OpenAI’s lawyers noted that Musk was briefed and asked to participate in investments that his lawsuits now claim corrupted the nonprofit.

During one discussion about Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in 2018, Altman said that “unlike a lot of meetings with Mr. Musk, this was a fun meeting,” where Musk spent “a long conversation showing us memes on his phone.”