OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the stand this morning to defend himself against a lawsuit filed by his former co-founder, Elon Musk, which challenges the company’s corporate structure. When asked at the outset about Musk’s claim that OpenAI’s other founders “stole a charity” by launching a for-profit subsidiary to commercialize products based on the company’s AI models, Altman paused for several seconds before responding. “It feels difficult to even wrap my head around that framing,” he said. “We created one of the largest charities in the world. This foundation is doing incredible work and will do much more.”

Musk’s legal team has emphasized that OpenAI’s foundation, now holding assets around $200 billion, did not have full-time employees until earlier this year. OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor testified that this was due to the challenge of converting OpenAI equity into cash, a process completed during the organization’s most recent restructuring in 2025. The central question from Musk’s lawyers is whether the company’s commitment to safety was abandoned as its commercial power grew. However, Altman stated that in 2017, during a critical period when founders were figuring out how to secure funding for their AI models, Musk’s “specific plans on safety made me worry.”

He recounted a “particularly hair-raising moment” in the debate when Musk was asked what would happen if he died while controlling a hypothetical OpenAI for-profit. According to Altman, Musk replied, “Maybe OpenAI should pass to my children.” Altman noted that Musk’s focus on controlling the initial for-profit gave him pause, as OpenAI was dedicated to preventing advanced AI from being concentrated in a single person’s hands. With his experience running the prominent startup accelerator Y Combinator, Altman knew that “founders who had control usually did not give it up.”

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Altman also testified that Musk’s management style, which might have worked in engineering and manufacturing, was ineffective at OpenAI. “I don’t think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab,” Altman said. “He had demotivated some of our most key researchers. He had at one point required Greg and Ilya to make a list of the researchers and list out their accomplishments and stack rank them and take a chainsaw through a bunch. That did huge damage for a long time to the culture of the organization.”

In fact, Altman portrayed himself as defending the “sweat equity” of fellow co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, who were effectively running OpenAI while Musk and Altman held other jobs. After that conflict remained unresolved, Musk left OpenAI’s board and launched competing AI initiatives at Tesla and his own AI startup, xAI. Yet Altman stayed in touch with the mercurial businessman, updating him on OpenAI’s work and seeking his funding and advice. OpenAI’s lawyers pointed out that Musk had been kept informed and was asked to participate in investments that his lawsuits now claim corrupted the non-profit. During a discussion of a Microsoft investment in OpenAI in 2018, Altman recalled that “unlike a lot of meetings with Mr. Musk, this was a good vibes meeting,” where Musk spent a “long conversation showing us memes on his phone.”