Musk mulled handing over OpenAI to his children, Altman testified

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman finally took the stand this morning to defend himself against Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the OpenAI company.

Altman was immediately asked what he thought of Musk’s claim that other OpenAI founders had “robbed charity” when they set up a profit-making part of the business based on the company’s AI models.

“It’s hard to even wrap my head around it,” Altman said after a few seconds of silence. “We’ve built one of the largest charities in the world. The foundation is doing amazing work and has done so much.”

Musk’s attorneys have struggled to point out that the OpenAI foundation, which now has assets on the order of $200 billion, had no full-time employees until earlier this year. OpenAI’s board chairman Bret Taylor testified today that it was due to the difficulty of converting OpenAI’s funds into money, which was achieved in the latest reorganization of the organization in 2025.

The main question that Musk’s judges asked was whether the company’s commitment to safety was abandoned as its business prowess grew. But Altman said that in 2017, this time the most important time while the startups grappled with how to get funding for their AI models, Musk’s “real security policies” worried me.

He also described a “hair-raising moment” during the debate when Musk was asked what would happen if he died while managing OpenAI’s profits. In Altman’s words, Musk said, “Maybe OpenAI should go to my children.”

Altman said Musk’s focus on controlling startup profits gave him pause because OpenAI was committed to keeping advanced AI in the hands of one person, and Altman, with his experience running the famous accelerator Y Combinator, knew “starters who had control often didn’t give up.”

Altman also testified that Musk’s management style, which may have worked in engineering and manufacturing, did not work for OpenAI.

“I don’t think Mr. Musk understands how to run a good research lab,” Altman said. “He brought down our most important researchers. At one point he wanted Greg and Ilya to write a list of the researchers and write down what they did and put it on the board and take the chain. This was very damaging for a long time to the culture of the organization.”

Indeed, Altman positioned himself as defending the “equal sweat equity” of co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, the two people running OpenAI at the time while Musk and Altman had other jobs.

After the controversy, Musk left OpenAI’s board and began competing with Tesla’s AI solutions with his own AI startup, xAI. But Altman contacted the entrepreneur, replacing him on the OpenAI project and asking for his money and advice.

OpenAI’s attorneys noted that Musk has been held hostage until now and has been asked to participate in sales that his lawsuits allege have interfered with the nonprofit.

During another discussion of Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in 2018, Altman said that “unlike many meetings with Mr. Musk, this was a good vibes meeting,” where Musk spent “a long conversation showing us memes on his phone.”