Did OpenAI mislead Elon Musk by taking his money as a non-profit and later shifting to a for-profit model? It is the question that sits at the centre of what is shaping up to be one of Silicon Valley’s messiest legal battles that is now definitely headed to court.In his 2024 lawsuit against OpenAI, Musk alleged that the ChatGPT maker and its leaders had abandoned the company’s original non-profit mission that he funded. On Thursday, January 15, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that the case warranted going to trial based on evidence such as hundreds of recently unsealed court documents.
“Part of this is about whether a jury believes the people who will testify and whether they are credible,” the judge said in court, while dismissing OpenAI and Microsoft’s last-ditch efforts to have Musk’s lawsuit thrown out. The case will be heard as a jury trial in a Northern California federal court from April 27 onwards.
Based on what has already come to light, the high-stakes trial is likely to surface fresh and fascinating details about the AI juggernaut’s early days as well as the circumstances surrounding CEO Sam Altman’s brief ouster and Microsoft’s complex relationship with OpenAI.
Over the past week, both OpenAI and Elon Musk have tried to sway the court of public opinion, using the newly unsealed evidence to argue over what exactly happened when Musk split ways with the AI startup he helped co-found.
Here’s a look at what the unsealed court documents reveal, what OpenAI says has been omitted, and what lies ahead in the courtroom showdown set for April this year.
What do the unsealed court documents reveal?
More than 100 documents related to Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI were unsealed last week. Obtained during the discovery process, the documents comprise thousands of pages of evidence including depositions from key players involved in the case such as Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati, and Satya Nadella, along with Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, ex-OpenAI board members who reportedly played a role in the firing of Altman in 2023.Story continues below this ad
While bits and pieces of the documents have been doing the rounds on social media, a diary entry by Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, has drawn particular attention as he appears to express doubts about pushing Musk out of OpenAI and committing to a non-profit-only entity.
“Some chance that rejecting Elon will actually lose us Sam. We’ll find out tomorrow if doing an override all the way through is palettable. This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon. Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick?” the diary read. In a separate entry, Brockman wrote, “It all comes down to the money. We can get it from Tesla, probably. We could also probably get it from Google,” he wrote.
“Cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit. Don’t want to say that we’re committed. If three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie,” another entry read. Brockman also reportedly wrote in his diary that he wanted to be a billionaire.
His diary entries were cited by Judge Rogers in her recent decision that Musk had enough evidence that he had been misled to take the case to trial.Story continues below this ad
The documents have also brought other information to light. For instance, Nadella was worried about Microsoft’s position in AI when he started looking at OpenAI. In 2022, Sutskever and Murati seemed quite concerned about the prominence of open-source lab Stability AI. OpenAI’s leaders also considered prohibiting investors from backing competing labs.
Microsoft edged out Amazon in securing an early partnership with OpenAI because Musk was opposed to working with Jeff Bezos. “I think Jeff is a bit of a tool and Satya is not, so I slightly prefer Microsoft, but I hate their marketing dept,” he wrote in an early email to Altman.
What has OpenAI said is missing from Musk’s claims?
Musk has been using the recently unsealed court documents to attack OpenAI and its leaders in posts on X. “They openly discuss their conspiracy to commit fraud and steal the charity,” he wrote. “They stole a charity, plain and simple,” Musk said in reply to another post about Brockman’s diary entries.
Musk’s argument boils down to the unsealed evidence clearly showing that OpenAI’s leadership knew about plans to go for-profit well before they announced the intention publicly, and that Musk and other stakeholders were deliberately misled.Story continues below this ad
In response, OpenAI accused Musk of cherry-picking snippets from Greg Brockman’s private journal entries. Its core argument is that Musk himself wanted OpenAI to be a for-profit in the early days.
“Elon said he wanted to accumulate $80B for a self-sustaining city on Mars, and that he needed and deserved majority equity. He said that he needed full control since he’d been burned by not having it in the past, and when we discussed succession he surprised us by talking about his children controlling AGI,” OpenAI said in a blog post titled ‘The truth Elon left out’ published on Friday, January 16.
What is the backstory to the Musk-OpenAI feud?
In 2015, Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI with several others as a non-profit with lofty charitable goals such as developing AGI for the benefit of humanity. They wanted to ensure Google, which had a huge lead in developing the technology, did not end up deciding what it would mean for the human race, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
However, by 2017, cracks began to appear in the bond between Musk and Altman. Eventually, Musk left and started his own AI venture called xAI in 2023. Since its founding, OpenAI operated as a non-profit-controlled organisation with a for-profit operating arm.Story continues below this ad
In 2023, the non-profit board fired Sam Altman after concluding that he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Days later, he was hired by Microsoft to lead a new AI initiative. But when nearly all of OpenAI’s remaining staff threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO and the board replaced.
A year later, OpenAI proposed to do away with the non-profit’s oversight and become a for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC). After facing backlash from advocacy groups, OpenAI later backtracked and said the non-profit will control and also be a large shareholder of the PBC.
In October 2025, it completed its transition to a for-profit PBC. Musk had initially sued OpenAI in a California state court. He withdrew the California suit in June 2025, then filed a federal suit in August 2025. “The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” his lawyers wrote.
