Musk v. Altman: tea, temper, and a Stargate cameo as Tesla CEO testifies in OpenAI trial

In a four-week trial before US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, Elon Musk spent three days on the stand as the first witness in his suit to block OpenAI's planned fourth-quarter 2026 initial public offering and recover an estimated $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, reports Ars Technica.

Musk cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, pledging $1 billion. Under oath, he conceded he ultimately contributed roughly $38 million before pulling funding, after cofounders Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever refused his demand for four of seven board seats and 51 percent of shares. He hired OpenAI engineer Andrej Karpathy to Tesla in 2017 without urging him to stay, proposed merging OpenAI into Tesla in 2018, and resigned from the board that year. OpenAI's October 2025 restructure converted its capped-profit arm into a more conventional for-profit entity, which closed a $122 billion round last month.

OpenAI counsel William Savitt—who previously represented Tesla and the Twitter board that forced Musk's $44 billion purchase—methodically dismantled Musk's "trusting fool" narrative. After Musk testified on direct that he does "not lose my temper" and does "not yell at people," Savitt baited him into doing both within the hour. Musk shouted, "I said I didn't look closely! I read the headline!" about a 2017 term sheet he insisted he never read past the warning box.

Savitt produced a 2016 Musk email to a Neuralink colleague conceding that setting OpenAI up as a nonprofit "might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move" because "DeepMind is moving very fast." Musk also admitted he did not know what AI "safety cards" are, despite xAI issuing them for Grok—currently facing litigation over alleged generation of child sexual abuse material. Judge Gonzalez Rogers repeatedly admonished Musk to stop being "sarcastic and evasive" and drew the courtroom's biggest laugh by cutting off an argumentative answer. Verge reporter Elizabeth Lopatto wrote, "I have never been more sympathetic to Sam Altman in my life." Altman watched, stone-faced.

The judge cleared OpenAI to question Musk on his ties to President Trump, including deposition testimony that, while serving as a "special government employee," Musk "complained to White House officials" about OpenAI's Stargate federal AI infrastructure project — to advantage his own competitor, xAI. His ketamine use at Burning Man also remains potentially admissible.