Elon Musk and Sam Altman both took a beating over their leadership styles in court testimony this week as a jury waded further into their OpenAI feud.
As people who worked closely with the two men over the startup’s tumultuous 11-year history took turns under oath on the witness stand, jurors heard that Musk lacked technical competency to oversee the development of artificial intelligence — and had a hot temper to boot.
Altman, meanwhile, came under fire by former OpenAI board members over for perceived deficiencies in honesty and integrity.
These are not new criticisms of two of the world’s leading tech entrepreneurs. But for the jury and judge refereeing their high-profile dispute, the testimony may play into the credibility contest over who is wronging whom.
Even US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has acknowledged that the case is much more about trustworthiness than it is about a smoking-gun corporate document or legal contract. “This trial, like many trials, boils down to who the jurors are going to believe,” she said Thursday.
The trial, which just finished its second week, is revisiting OpenAI’s arc from scrappy startup founded in 2015 to benefit humanity to behemoth now valued at almost $1 trillion.
The week started with attorneys questioning Greg Brockman, a software engineer by training who worked with Musk, Altman and others to launch the startup — before a dramatic falling out that eventually led to the court fight.
The way Musk has told it in his own testimony, he was the one who brought the capital, connections and vision for OpenAI to serve the public good — only to see it stolen by Altman and Brockman and converted to a for-profit business for their own benefit.
But Brockman, OpenAI’s president, testified that when a power struggle broke out around 2017, a “major concern” was that Musk didn’t have AI chops and that he wasn’t going to “spend the time required to actually get good at it.”
“Look, he knows rockets, he knows electric cars,” Brockman said. “He did not – and I believe does not – know AI.”
Brockman also recounted a tense moment in August 2017 during discussions about restructuring OpenAI when he says Musk grew angry before taking back a painting that he had just presented as a gift.
“He stood up and he stormed around the table,” Brockman said. “I actually thought he was going to hit me. I truly thought he was going to physically attack me. Instead, he just grabbed the painting and started to storm out of the room.”
Altman eventually took the helm at OpenAI the year after Musk left the board in 2018. He was briefly ousted as chief executive officer in 2023 and then quickly reinstated.
In video testimony, the startup’s one-time chief technology officer, Mira Murati, recalled Musk “creating chaos” among top executives at the company. She also said Altman “undermined” her and did not always tell the truth.
Murati, who was briefly appointed to serve as interim CEO after OpenAI’s board fired Altman in 2023, said her criticism of him was mostly “management related.”
“I had an incredibly hard job to do in an organization that was very complex,” she testified. “I was asking Sam to lead, and lead with clarity, and not undermine my ability to do my job.”
At the time of his firing, the board said in a statement that Altman had not been “consistently candid” in his communications about OpenAI’s activities.
Jurors were shown video depositions of two former OpenAI board members who voted in favor of ousting Altman: Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley.
Toner described a “pattern of behavior related to his honesty, candor and resistance to board oversight.”
McCauley echoed that sentiment and described a “toxic culture of lying that was kind of leading to these crisis events.”
“There were many, many smaller interactions that gave me real doubt as to whether I could trust what the CEO was telling us,” McCauley said.
The former board members said Altman misled them about them about a new AI’s model safety review by saying it had been cleared when it hadn’t.
The dissolution of Musk and Altman’s relationship put pressure on some at OpenAI, including Shivon Zilis, an adviser in the early days of the nonprofit who served on the board from 2020 to 2023. She is also the mother of four children with Musk and is currently an executive at Neuralink, his brain-implant company.
Zilis testified that one of her roles at OpenAI had been to “facilitate communication for the greater good,” a task she said was complicated by the split between Musk and the other co-founders.
“Candidly, they were kind of bad at speaking to each other sometimes,” she said. “There are often tricky topics that maybe wouldn’t land well over text, or they wanted to just make super sure they hit Elon when he was in a good head space and had time to think about it.”
Altman is expected to testify next week before the trial wraps up on Thursday.
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