How Elon Musk left OpenAI, according to Greg Brockman

In late August 2017, key figures at OpenAI (which was a small non-profit lab) got together to discuss how to make a profit in order to sell its technology and raise the necessary funds to implement AGI.

Elon Musk wanted full control of the company and had just given each of his co-founders a Tesla Model 3. CTO Greg Brockman said that he saw it as a way to fuel them at a time when Musk and Sam Altman were fighting to win support for their vision for the future of the company. The director of OpenAI research, Ilya Sutskever, ordered a recording of Tesla to present Musk at the meeting as a friendly gesture.

Negotiations didn’t go that way: When Musk was told the others wouldn’t agree to his bid for control of the company, Brockman said he was angry and frustrated. He sat for a few minutes thinking in silence.

Then, in Brockman’s words, Musk said, “I refuse.” The SpaceX and Tesla founder “stood up and walked around the table … I thought he was going to hit me. He grabbed the photo and started to walk out of the room. Then he turned around and said, ‘When are you leaving OpenAI?’

Brockman and Sutskever didn’t leave or commit to Musk’s vision. Musk stopped his regular contributions to the company’s operating budget, and within six months, he left the group, although he paid for the company’s shared space with Neuralink until 2020.

As today’s debate over the future of OpenAI continues, scrutiny has focused on a pivotal moment in 2017 when the organization’s founders disagreed on who would oversee its future, ultimately bringing us Musk’s lawsuit against his co-founders.

We have not heard from Sam Altman, but the president of OpenAI Greg Brockman testified for two days, often referring to a personal journal that provides rare information about what it is like to be a 30-year-old executive in the fight against Elon Musk.

“It’s very painful,” Brockman said of the publicity surrounding the magazine, which he called “personal writing that wasn’t made for the world to see. (But) it’s nothing I’m ashamed of.”

Cutthroat conversations between startup founders are rarely shared publicly, especially when a company is as global as OpenAI.

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

Jurors won’t see the note, but Musk’s lawyers will do their best to identify his ghost. They are trying to show the court that Altman and Brockman “stolen charity,” while OpenAI’s legal team is trying to show that Musk had a similar agenda.

The event that inspired all of this was when the OpenAI model defeated the top player in the video game DOTA II. Brockman said that convincing everyone in the organization that computing is the most important tool for building powerful AI tools, but that fundraising as a non-profit will not be enough.

This led to discussions about the company’s profit support, which Musk wanted to control “unquestionably”, especially in the beginning. Some founders have said they want equal shares, and perhaps even more money comes with investment money. Another idea on the table was somehow to connect OpenAI to Tesla’s AI project. Shivon Zillis, an OpenAI consultant who helped Musk and the team there, said there are more than 20 differences in the concept.

But when other founders didn’t yield to Musk’s authority, their partnership fell apart.

“It shouldn’t be the case that there is one person who has all the power over OpenAI,” Brockman said. Brockman and Sutskever discussed a plan to oust Elon from the OpenAI board moving forward, which led to a November 2017 filing that Musk’s lawyers focused on.

‘(C)n’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a bad fight,” Brockman wrote. and his story will be right that we weren’t honest with him in the end about wanting to still make a profit without him….btw another insight into this is that it would be wrong to rob him of his non-profit. to turn to b-corp without him. that would be very bad manners. and actually not stupid.”

The line about “theft for no profit” may seem alarming, but the story, according to Brockman, was about trying or not trying to throw Musk on the board. They didn’t do that. Musk voluntarily stepped down from the board in February 2018, concluding that “OpenAI is on a path to failure,” saying he plans to focus on AI at Tesla.

Brockman described his feelings as trying to figure out if he would be satisfied with his work life.

“This is the only chance we have to get out of Elon,” he wrote during the interview. Is he the ‘glorious leader’ I would choose? We really have an opportunity for me to do this.

This last reflection was also seized upon by Musk’s lawyers as a sign that Brockman was thinking more about his wealth than about his non-profit work. Brockman said he is worth about $30 billion in the company, which was an opportunity for Steve Molo, Musk’s general lawyer, to criticize him.

“Why didn’t you take $29 billion more than the billion you said you would be better off with, and give it to charity?” Molo asked.

“Look what we’ve done,” Brockman replied. “The nonprofit OpenAI organization has more than $150 billion in OpenAI assets. This is something we’ve built through hard work, blood, sweat and tears, all this time since Elon left.”

Molo also considered emails in which Brockman said he would donate $100,000 to OpenAI, which he never did. Ironically, Brockman may be best known for making the largest political donation of 2025, $25 million to MAGA Inc., a SuperPAC supporting President Donald Trump, but it did not come up in the lawsuit.

Molo laughed off Brockman’s description of a meeting where he was charged about his management of the company that Musk was “bad” to Brockman, and said Brockman didn’t understand leadership the way Musk, a serial entrepreneur, did.

Brockman, however, said Musk doesn’t understand AI. “He didn’t know and he doesn’t know AI,” he said, referring to Musk’s criticism of the initial demonstration of potential ChatGPT software. “We didn’t think they would spend the time necessary to be successful.”

“The fact that Elon saw the very first research, which really started all these things, (and) he didn’t realize that the spark – this was something that was very important to not happen in this environment,” Brockman said.

In 2019, OpenAI will make a profit and use it to raise $1 billion from Microsoft. The company will raise another $13 billion in funding from the software giant over the next four years, furthering its rise as a leading AI lab. It also boosted the company’s management and employee base, as well as the non-profit OpenAI stock.

And finally, the contracts fueled Musk’s suspicions that Altman and Brockman got him, which led him to file his suit in 2024. The trial is expected to continue next week.