Musk v. Altman trial gets underway: Here's what to know

Added: 2026-04-28

[00:00:00]Welcome back. The high-stakes trial [music] between Elon Musk and OpenAI kicking off just moments ago. Kate Rooney outside the courthouse in Oakland with what we should expect. Hi, Kate.

[00:00:11]Hey, Mike. So, jury selection is underway here in the Elon Musk versus Sam Altman trial. Elon Musk, for some context here, suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, as well as President Greg Brockman, and Microsoft is also a co-defendant. Musk, of course, was a co-founder of OpenAI. He alleges he was deceived into funding the company under the guise of a non-profit mission. So, Musk's lawyers now claim the move to a for-profit structure and then the multi-billion dollar deal with Microsoft that actually was updated this morning does violate that original charitable trust. So, Musk's team recently dropped the fraud charges, now just focused on two claims here in this trial. So, first, breach of charitable trust.

[00:00:52]Musk's team says that the founding promise was to keep OpenAI an open-source non-profit and then prevent any tech giant, so Google at the time, Microsoft as well, from monopolizing that technology. The second claim that's being talked about here is unjust enrichment. Musk claims that Altman and Brockman used his funding and his prestige to build OpenAI into what is now an $800 billion company that they now allegedly profit from personally.

[00:01:18]Musk is seeking up to $134 billion in damages, which he says he would donate to the OpenAI charity, plus the removal of Altman and Brockman from their leadership roles, also unwinding the recent restructuring the company did in the fall. All of these moves, guys, could, of course, harm OpenAI's potential IPO. We're hearing could come as soon as the end of this year. OpenAI, though, dismissing those claims as baseless. Here's what OpenAI's CFO, Sarah Friar, said about it last week on the show.

[00:01:46]First of all, Mr. Musk has thrown many kind of baseless lawsuits at us. It's really a distraction. We talked about focus. So, for the company, it's all about focus. How do we release the best models in the world, stay on the frontier? How do we release the best products in the world that are delightful and feel human?

[00:02:06]This morning, the company calling this a jealous bid to derail a competitor. Musk has argued They say, actually, Musk at the time, I should say, supported a for-profit pivot and then a potential merger with Tesla, as well, according to OpenAI. We do expect opening arguments to kick off tomorrow after jury selection. That will launch us into a high-profile list of witnesses. It includes Elon Musk himself, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, guys.

[00:02:34]Kate, the original premise of setting up OpenAI as a non-profit was meant to make sure that AI technology was kind of pursued safely, right? It was going to be somehow under control. I just sort of wonder, I mean, obviously, there could be a breach of contract, even if that goal maybe has has been compromised or it's become much more dispersed among different players, but it is an interesting little time capsule of where this all started.

[00:03:01]It's really interesting, Mike, and a big part of this was actually Google. If you read the original complaint, it talks about Elon Musk and Sam Altman getting together to form OpenAI to pretty much take on Google because they thought that after the company acquired DeepMind, which was one of the leaders in AI early on, it couldn't be done responsibly. So, they said, "We're actually going to do this to counter any sort of big tech attempt to dominate AI." And here we are in 2026, about a decade later, where big tech really is the story when we talk about AI. So much has changed, and the capital required to build these models is just unbelievable. The money involved here, the the premise really has changed. They were talking about building it safely in in non-profits.

[00:03:41]OpenAI has argued that was impossible.

[00:03:43]Flash forward, you need all this compute, you need to spend on data centers to win, and it's resulted in massive amounts of money raised, and that really is at the core of the argument what we're going to hear in the next couple of weeks here.

[00:03:53]All right, should be juicy. Thank you, Kate Kate Rooney.