Elon Musk took the stand on April 28 as the first witness in Musk v. Altman, the jury trial he brought against OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft in California federal court. Musk co-founded OpenAI, invested up to $38 million in the early years, and walked away after disagreements about whether OpenAI should be folded into Tesla. He later founded xAI, now owned by SpaceX. The current suit — one of at least four Musk has filed against OpenAI, most of which were dropped or dismissed — alleges OpenAI violated its founding mission to build AGI for the benefit of humanity, and adds claims of fraud, unjust enrichment, and breach of charitable trust. Musk is asking the court to strip Altman and Brockman of their positions and unwind OpenAI's for-profit restructuring.
The witness list is the part that matters. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, and former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati — now founder of Thinking Machines Lab — are all expected to testify. That means on-the-record sworn statements about how Microsoft's roughly $13 billion in OpenAI investments are structured, how the non-profit-to-for-profit conversion was decided internally, and how disagreements over commercialization unfolded. Murati's testimony in particular is high-stakes — she left OpenAI under unclear circumstances and has not spoken publicly about internal dynamics in detail. Whatever the verdict, the discovery and testimony will be the most extensive primary-source account of OpenAI's governance to date.
Two scenarios matter. If Musk wins on the breach-of-charitable-trust claim, the relief he is asking for — unwinding the for-profit restructuring and removing Altman and Brockman — would force OpenAI to reorganize on a scale that would ripple through Microsoft's investment, Anthropic's competitive position, and the industry's funding model. That scenario is widely viewed as a long shot but not zero. The more likely scenarios — Musk loses, or the parties settle — still produce a public record of OpenAI's mission decisions and Microsoft entanglement that will inform every future regulatory inquiry into AI companies structured as non-profits with for-profit subsidiaries. The trial is, in many ways, the closest thing the AI industry has had to an antitrust hearing without actually being one.
For builders, the trial mostly matters as a source of forced disclosure. If you build on the OpenAI API, you have a commercial relationship with an entity whose governance, mission, and corporate structure are now being adjudicated in open court — pay attention to what comes out in testimony, because the Nadella, Scott, and Murati appearances will produce facts that are not currently public. If you build on Anthropic, xAI, or any other competitor, the trial creates a baseline for what counts as "AGI mission drift" in the eyes of a federal jury. And if you have cared about OpenAI's 2018 charter language since it was published, the case may produce a court ruling on whether that language was contractually binding or aspirational. Either ruling has knock-on effects on how the next generation of AI labs structure their charters.