Two weeks into the Musk v. Altman trial in Oakland, California, the scorecard looks like this: both sides have been embarrassed, the judge has already signalled scepticism toward Musk's legal theory, and OpenAI is heading toward a stock market listing with its internal dysfunction now on the public record.
The core legal question is whether Altman and Brockman violated a charitable duty to Musk when OpenAI shifted from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure. Musk donated $38 million and claims he was promised it would stay a nonprofit forever. OpenAI says no such promise was ever made in writing, and that Musk himself pushed hard for a for-profit structure, then walked out when he was told he could not be in charge of it.
Brockman's two days of testimony painted Musk as someone who wanted majority equity, the right to choose most board members, and the CEO title. When the other founders said no, he grabbed a painting and left the room. Brockman testified he thought Musk was going to hit him. Musk two days before the trial started texted Brockman asking about a settlement, and when Brockman suggested both sides drop all claims, Musk replied that by the end of the week, Brockman and Altman would be the most hated men in America.
Musk's lawyers responded by reading Brockman's own private journal aloud in court. In it, Brockman wrote about wanting to reach a billion dollars in personal wealth and openly contemplated converting OpenAI into a for-profit without Musk, writing that it would be "morally bankrupt" to do so. He also never followed through on a pledge to donate $100,000 to the nonprofit himself, yet today holds a stake worth approximately $30 billion.
For anyone who uses or procures AI tools at their company, both of these men run the organisation behind ChatGPT, which is deeply embedded in corporate workflows globally. What the trial has revealed is that the company at the centre of that dependency has been shaped by ego, personal financial ambition, and fractured trust at the top since its earliest days.
The more serious blow to OpenAI came from its own former technology chief, Mira Murati. In a video deposition shown to the jury, she said Altman told different people completely opposite things and that she believed he was not telling her the truth when he told her the company's legal team had cleared a new AI model to skip a safety review. She said she feared the company was at catastrophic risk of falling apart during the November 2023 crisis when Altman was briefly fired. Former board member Helen Toner corroborated this, describing a pattern of dishonesty, resistance to board oversight, and manipulation of internal processes.
Altman was reinstated days later because roughly 750 employees threatened to quit if he did not return. That is not a story of a board making a principled governance decision. That is a story of a single person becoming so operationally irreplaceable that removing him was essentially impossible, regardless of the evidence against him.
This matters well beyond the courtroom. OpenAI is not just a technology vendor. It is heading for a public stock listing that could be the largest in American history, at a company that was burning through roughly $17 billion a year as of early 2026 and does not expect to turn a profit until around 2030. Investors will be asked to value it near a trillion dollars based largely on a growth story and the credibility of its leadership.
The trial has not hurt OpenAI's ability to raise money so far. It closed a $122 billion funding round in April 2026 even while the case was being prepared. But institutional investors in a private round and ordinary shareholders on a public exchange are different audiences with different risk tolerances and different legal protections.
Musk is unlikely to win the core case. Prediction markets put his chances at around 32%. Legal analysts widely consider his theory weak, partly because there is no written agreement supporting his version of what was promised, and partly because his own company, xAI, was trained on OpenAI's models, which violates OpenAI's terms of service. He admitted this in court. Suing someone while copying their work is not a morally coherent position.
But the trial was probably never really about winning. It has put unflattering sworn testimony about Altman's honesty permanently into the public record, right before OpenAI needs to convince public-market investors to bet on him at a very steep price. That timing was not an accident.