Jury selection begins Monday in a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, in what may be the most consequential trial in AI history. Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI for up to $134 billion, alleging that the company's founders reneged on their promise to keep the AI lab a nonprofit and instead converted it into an $852 billion for-profit enterprise — enriching themselves at the expense of the charitable mission.
The trial is scheduled to run four weeks. The witness list reads like a who's-who of the AI industry: Musk, Altman, Brockman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and co-founder Ilya Sutskever are all expected to testify.
What Musk Is Asking For
Musk dropped his fraud claims on Friday to streamline the case, leaving just two claims to go before the jury: unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust. Both focus on outcomes rather than intent — did the nonprofit-to-profit conversion enrich insiders at the expense of the charitable mission?
If Musk prevails, he wants all ill-gotten gains returned to OpenAI's nonprofit foundation — not to himself personally. He is also seeking to have Altman and Brockman removed from their roles and to unwind OpenAI's for-profit conversion and restructuring entirely.
The stakes are staggering. An order unwinding the conversion could theoretically dismantle OpenAI's current corporate structure, threatening its planned IPO and every partnership and investment tied to the for-profit entity.
The Smoking Gun
The most damaging piece of evidence is not an email from Altman. It is a 2017 diary entry from Greg Brockman that reads: "I cannot believe that we committed to non-profit if three months later we're doing b-corp then it was a lie."
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers cited that entry directly in her January ruling that sent the case to trial. She found what she described as ample evidence supporting Musk's claims and rejected nearly every attempt by OpenAI and Microsoft to dismiss the lawsuit. The ruling was a 28-page signal that the court considers the allegations serious enough for a jury to hear.
Musk's lawyers have also produced a 2017 email in which Altman said he remained enthusiastic about the nonprofit structure after Musk threatened to cut off funding a statement that, if the jury sees it as insincere, could support the breach of charitable trust claim.
OpenAI's Defense
OpenAI, Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft have all denied wrongdoing. Altman's team argues that Musk is rewriting history. They contend Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and never delivered the full $1 billion he pledged. They also say Musk himself agreed years ago about the need to convert to a for-profit structure in order to raise capital — but wanted OpenAI folded into Tesla, which Altman rejected.
OpenAI completed its restructuring in October 2025 and now operates as a nonprofit with a 26 percent stake in the for-profit arm that includes ChatGPT. The company argues the conversion serves the mission better than the original structure ever could enabling it to raise the hundreds of billions needed to compete at the frontier of AI development.
Altman has been publicly combative about the trial, posting on X in February that he was really excited to get Musk under oath, calling it Christmas in April.
The Musk-Altman Rivalry
The personal dimension of the case adds a layer of drama that goes beyond corporate law. Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI together in 2015 with a shared vision of building safe AI for humanity. Their relationship has since deteriorated into one of the most bitter rivalries in tech history.
Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018 and founded xAI in 2023, which has become one of OpenAI's direct competitors. He has also sued OpenAI and Apple separately for alleged anticompetitive behavior through X, with a hearing in that case scheduled for May in Texas.
The trial lands at a pivotal moment for both men. Musk is preparing to take SpaceX public in what could be a record IPO. Altman is navigating OpenAI through a period of intense competition with Anthropic, executive departures, and growing scrutiny of the company's public image.
Why It Matters Beyond OpenAI
The trial is not just about OpenAI. It is about whether the nonprofit-to-profit conversion model is legally sustainable in AI. OpenAI was not the first technology organization to start as a nonprofit and accumulate enormous value. Mozilla did. Wikipedia resisted. The question the Oakland courtroom will address is whether founders who built a company with charitable donations and a stated commitment to benefit humanity can legally convert that work into an $852 billion for-profit enterprise and keep the equity.
The jury's verdict will be advisory Judge Gonzalez Rogers will make the final ruling on remedies. But the outcome could send shockwaves through the AI industry, affecting not just OpenAI but every AI company weighing its own structure, governance, and obligations to the public interest.
For the next four weeks, two of the most powerful figures in technology will make their cases under oath. The jury and ultimately the judge will decide whether OpenAI's transformation was a legitimate evolution or a betrayal of the mission that made it possible.
