How Elon Musk left OpenAI, according to Greg Brockman

In late August 2017, key figures at OpenAI (then a small non-profit research lab) met to discuss how they would profitably commercialize its technology and raise the funds needed to achieve AGI.

Elon Musk wanted full control of the company and had recently given each of his founders a Tesla Model 3. CTO Greg Brockman said he saw that as a way to butter them up while Musk and Sam Altman were fighting to gain support for their different visions for the future of the company. The head of OpenAI research, Ilya Sutskever, had sent a drawing of Tesla to give to Musk during the meeting as a friendly gesture.

The interview did not follow that sentiment: When Musk was told that others would not agree to his bid for control of the company, Brockman said he became angry and upset. He sat for a few minutes thinking in silence.

Then, at Brockman’s telling, Musk said, “I refuse.” The SpaceX and Tesla founder “got up and walked around the table…I thought he was going to hit me. He took the painting and started storming out of the room. Then he turned and said, ‘When are you going to leave OpenAI?'”

Brockman and Sutskever did not abandon or commit to Musk’s vision. Musk stopped his regular contributions to the company’s operating budget, and within six months, he would leave the board, although he is paying for the office space the company shares with Neuralink until 2020.

Like today’s legal battle over the future of OpenAI’s ongoing funding, the scrutiny reached a critical juncture in 2017 when the original founders of the organization disagreed on who would control its future, ultimately bringing Musk’s lawsuit against his founders.

We don’t have to hear about Sam Altman, but the president of OpenAI Greg Brockman gave evidence for two days, often referring to a personal journal that gives a rare insight into what it’s like to be a 30-year-old technology executive in a tough battle with Elon Musk.

“It’s very sad,” Brockman said of the magazine’s publication, which he called “deeply personal documents that were never meant for the world to see. [But] I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Cutthroat conversations between startup founders are rarely shared publicly, especially when a company is as disruptive to the world as OpenAI.

We saw the latest taste of this outrage when OpenAI lawyers shared a text message Musk sent to Brockman two days before the trial began: “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you persist, it will be.”

A judge won’t see that note, but Musk’s lawyers have done their best to see its spirit. They are trying to show the court that Altman and Brockman “stole charity,” while OpenAI’s legal team is trying to show that Musk had the same plan in mind.

An inspiring case of all this was when an OpenAI model beat a top human player in the video game DOTA II. Brockman said that reassures everyone at the organization that computing is an essential resource for building powerful AI tools, but fundraising as a nonprofit won’t be enough.

That led to discussions about a for-profit company, with Musk seeking “unchanged” control, at least initially. Some founders have proposed equity shares, and perhaps more equity along with capital investment. Another idea on the table was somehow connecting OpenAI with Tesla’s AI work. Shivon Zilis, an OpenAI consultant who served as Musk’s liaison with the team there, said there are more than 20 variations on the program.

But when other founders didn’t want to give Musk control, their collaboration emerged.

“It shouldn’t be the case that there is one person who has full and complete authority over OpenAI,” Brockman testified. Brockman and Sutskever discussed a plan to kick Elon off the OpenAI board moving forward, which led to the November 2017 journal entry that Musk’s lawyers focused on.

‘[C]”I don’t see us doing this for profit without a serious fight,” Brockman wrote.[I’m] I’m just thinking about the office and we’re in the office. and his story will be correct that we were not honest with him in the end about the fact that we still want to make a profit without him….btw another note on this is that it would be wrong to steal non-profit money from him. converting to b-corp without him. that would be very moral. and he’s not really stupid.”

That “non-profit theft” may seem like a bad idea, but the point, according to Brockman, was whether or not to try and throw Musk on board. In the end they didn’t. Musk voluntarily left the board in February 2018, concluding that “OpenAI is on a path to certain failure,” saying he planned to focus more on AI at Tesla.

Brockman described his reflection as an attempt to determine whether he would be satisfied with his work life.

“This is the only chance we have to get out of Elon,” he wrote during the negotiations. “Is he the ‘glorious leader’ I would choose? We really have a chance to make this happen. Financially what will get me to $1B?”

That last thought was also taken by Musk’s lawyers as a sign that Brockman was thinking more about his personal wealth than the nonprofit’s mission. Brockman said his current stake in the company is worth about $30 billion, which was an opportunity for Steve Molo, Musk’s lead attorney, to chide him.

“Why didn’t you take $29 billion more than the billion you said you would be okay with, and donate it to charity?” Molo asked.

“Look at what we’ve accomplished,” Brockman replied. “The OpenAI nonprofit organization has an equity value of OpenAI of over $150 billion. That’s something we’ve built with hard work, blood, sweat and tears, all this time since Elon left.”

Molo also focused on emails in which Brockman said he would donate $100,000 to OpenAI, something he never did. Ironically, Brockman may be best known to the public for making the largest donation of the 2025 political cycle, $25 million to MAGA Inc., a SuperPAC supporting President Donald Trump, but that did not appear in the lawsuit.

Molo mocked Brockman’s description of the meeting charged with his control of the company by saying that Musk “softened” Brockman, and suggested that Brockman did not understand management issues as Musk, the serial founder, did.

Brockman, however, said Musk doesn’t understand AI. “He didn’t and doesn’t know AI,” he testified, explaining Musk dismissed an early demonstration of the software that would become ChatGPT. “We didn’t think he would spend the time needed to do well.”

“The fact that Elon saw this original version of the study, which put all these things, [and] I didn’t see that spark—that’s exactly the kind of thing that was important to avoid happening in this area,” Brockman said.

In 2019, OpenAI will generate profits and use it to raise $1 billion from Microsoft. The company will raise an additional $13 billion in funding for the software giant over the next four years, fueling its rise as a leading AI lab. It also boosted the value of the company’s executives and employees, as well as the assets held by the nonprofit OpenAI.

And eventually, those deals led Musk to suspect that Altman and Brockman were against him, leading him to file his lawsuit in 2024. The case is expected to continue next week.