Business
May 13, 2026
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- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified Tuesday in his company’s ongoing legal battle with co-founder Elon Musk.
- Altman said that Musk wanted to serve as OpenAI CEO instead of Altman before leaving the company.
- Musk is suing Altman, over claims he sought to benefit by converting OpenAI into a for-profit.
The battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took another turn Tuesday, as the latter took the stand to testify. Musk is suing Altman, along with OpenAI president Greg Brockman, over claims they sought to benefit themselves by converting the AI startup into a for-profit. OpenAI, meanwhile says Musk is upset he left OpenAI before it became the company it is today.
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What Sam Altman Had to Say About Elon Musk
Elon Musk and Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI, and worked together up until Musk left the company in 2018. Since then, Musk and Altman have battled, culminating to Musk filing a formal lawsuit and even founding his own platform, xAI. Musk is now suing OpenAI and its leaders over allegations that it breached their charitable trust when OpenAI shifted from its nonprofit mission to include a profit-oriented structure late last year. Further, he wants OpenAI to revert to a nonprofit and for Altman to lose his board position. Musk is also asking that more than $130 billion go back into OpenAI’s nonprofit arm.
Altman took the stand for the first time Tuesday to defend himself and his company, saying damning things about Musk. One of the hottest quotes came when discussing Musk’s vision for the company and his role there. Specifically, Musk wanted “total control” of any for-profit OpenAI entity to start, Altman testified. Altman said wasn’t convinced Musk would step back, citing his experience working with startups where leaders rarely give up power over a successful company.
“My belief is he wanted to have long-term control and that he would have had that had we agreed to the structure he wanted,” Altman added in his testimony. Furthermore, Altman said that after meeting Musk in the mid-2010s, the latter occasionally expressed concerns about the dangers of A.I. However Musk spent far more time saying he was worried about companies like Google getting ahead in AI race.
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Altman’s Defense
The prosecution on behalf of Musk implies that Altman was putting commercial gain over the aims of the nonprofit. In defense of the claims against himself and OpenAI shifting its non-profit mission, Altman insisted that he could not have built OpenAI into such a valuable charity without attaching it to a for-profit venture.
“Every step of the way, I have done my best to maximize the value of the nonprofit,” Altman said. “I would point out that there are not a lot of historical examples of a nonprofit at this scale. And we were kind of left for dead.”
What’s Next in Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman and OpenAI
The Musk vs. OpenAI trial entered its third week this week, and is looking to be nearing its conclusion. Closing arguments are on Thursday, and a decision from a jury and judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers may come next week. Many industry leaders view the outcome of this trial as a crucial point for the future of OpenAI and the AI industry as a whole.
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Beyond OpenAI, Elon Musk also continues to work on competing against AI rivals with his xAI platform. In addition to suing OpenAI, Musk has also called out Claude developer Anthropic AI, accusing
the firm of stealing training data and paying multi-billion-dollar settlements for it.
