Greg Brockman reveals how Elon Musk departed OpenAI

In late August 2017, key figures at OpenAI—then a small nonprofit research lab—met to discuss how they would establish a for-profit entity to commercialize their technology and raise the capital needed to achieve AGI.

Elon Musk was demanding full control of the company and had just given each of his co-founders a Tesla Model 3. CTO Greg Brockman said he saw that as an attempt to sweeten them up at a time when Musk and Sam Altman were competing for support for their respective visions of the company’s future. OpenAI’s head of research, Ilya Sutskever, had commissioned a painting of a Tesla to give Musk during the meeting as a friendly gesture.

The conversation did not match that mood: when Musk was told the others would not agree to his demand for control, Brockman said he became angry and upset. He sat quietly thinking for several minutes.

Then, according to Brockman, Musk said, “I decline.” The SpaceX and Tesla founder “stood up and stormed around the table…I thought he was going to hit me. He grabbed the painting and started to storm out of the room. And then he turned around and said, ‘When will you be departing OpenAI?’”

Brockman and Sutskever did not leave or commit to Musk’s vision. Musk stopped his regular donations to the company’s operating budget, and within six months he would leave the board, though he paid for office space the company shared with Neuralink until 2020.

As the current legal battle over OpenAI’s future unfolds, scrutiny has focused on a key period in 2017 when the organization’s original co-founders disagreed over who would control its future, eventually leading to Musk’s lawsuit against his co-founders.

We have yet to hear from Sam Altman, but OpenAI president Greg Brockman testified for two days, often referencing a personal journal that offers a rare glimpse into what it’s like to be a 30-year-old tech executive in a pitched battle with Elon Musk.

“It’s very painful,” Brockman said of the publicity around the journal, which he called “deeply personal writings that were never meant for the world to see. [But] there’s nothing in there I’m ashamed of.”

Cutthroat negotiations between startup founders are rarely shared so publicly, especially when a company becomes as world-changing as OpenAI.

We recently saw a taste of this rancor when OpenAI’s lawyers shared a text message Musk sent to Brockman two days before the trial began: “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.”

The jury won’t see that note, but Musk’s lawyers have done their best to realize its spirit. They are trying to convince the court that Altman and Brockman “stole a charity,” while OpenAI’s legal team attempts to show that Musk had the exact same plan in mind.

The inciting incident for all this was when an OpenAI model defeated the top human player in the video game DOTA II. Brockman said that convinced everyone in the organization that compute was the key resource for building powerful AI tools, but that fundraising purely as a nonprofit would be insufficient.

That led to discussions about a for-profit subsidiary, of which Musk wanted “unequivocal” control, at least initially. The other founders proposed equal shares, and perhaps more equity commensurate with a cash investment. Another idea on the table was linking OpenAI to Tesla’s AI work. Shivon Zilis, an OpenAI advisor who acted as a go-between for Musk and the team, said there were more than 20 variations on the plan.

But when the other founders refused to give Musk control, their partnership fell apart.

“It should not be the case that there exists one person with full and absolute control over OpenAI,” Brockman testified. Brockman and Sutskever discussed a plan to remove Elon from OpenAI’s board in order to move forward, resulting in November 2017 journal entries that Musk’s lawyers have focused on.

“[C]an’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” Brockman wrote. “[I’m] just thinking about the office and we’re in the office. and his story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for profit just without him….btw another realization from this is that it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt. and he’s really not an idiot.”

That “steal the non-profit” line may seem damning, but according to Brockman, the context was whether to try to remove Musk from the board. They ultimately did not do that. Musk left the board voluntarily in February 2018, concluding that “OpenAI is on a path of certain failure,” saying he planned to focus more on AI at Tesla.

Brockman described his reflections as an effort to determine whether he would be satisfied with his work life.

“This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon,” he wrote during the talks. “Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick? We truly have a chance to make this happen. Financially what will take me to $1B?”

That last reflection was also seized upon by Musk’s lawyers as a sign that Brockman was thinking more about his personal wealth than the nonprofit’s mission. Brockman said his current stake in the company is worth nearly $30 billion, which became an opportunity for Steve Molo, Musk’s lead trial attorney, to berate him.

“Why didn’t you take the $29 billion more than the billion you said you would be good with, and donate that to the charity?” Molo demanded.

“Look at what we accomplished,” Brockman replied. “The OpenAI nonprofit has over $150 billion of OpenAI equity value. That is something we have built through hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, all this time since Elon left.”

Molo also focused on emails where Brockman said he would donate $100,000 to OpenAI, something he never did. Ironically, Brockman might be best known to the public for making the largest donation of the 2025 political cycle—$25 million given to MAGA Inc., a SuperPAC supporting President Donald Trump—but that did not come up in the trial.

Molo did mock Brockman’s description of the charged meeting over control of the company as Musk being “mean” to Brockman, and suggested that Brockman did not understand governance issues the way Musk, a serial founder, did.

Brockman, however, said Musk did not understand AI. “He did not and does not know AI,” he testified, describing Musk dismissing an early demonstration of the software that would become ChatGPT. “We did not think he was going to spend the time required to actually get good at it.”

“The fact that Elon saw this very early version of the research, that really set all these things in motion, [and] didn’t recognize that spark—that was exactly the kind of thing that was critical to avoid happening in this environment,” Brockman said.

In 2019, OpenAI created a for-profit and used it to raise $1 billion from Microsoft. The company would raise an additional $13 billion from the software giant over the next four years, fueling its rise as the leading AI frontier lab. It also fueled the net worth of the company’s executives and employees, as well as the assets held by OpenAI the nonprofit.

And ultimately, those deals fueled Musk’s suspicions that Altman and Brockman got one over on him, leading him to file his suit in 2024. The trial is expected to continue through next week.