OpenAI President Greg Brockman took the stand Monday in Oakland federal court and confirmed under oath that his stake in the company is worth nearly $30 billion — a disclosure that immediately reframed the second week of Musk v. Altman around a single, awkward number.
Elon Musk's attorney mentioned the $30 billion figure more than a dozen times across more than two hours of cross-examination, repeatedly pressing Brockman on whether his personal windfall could be reconciled with OpenAI's stated mission to build artificial intelligence "to benefit all of humanity." Brockman maintained that the mission has not changed even as the board has sold equity to outside investors and the company has ballooned to a reported valuation of roughly $852 billion.
A combative day on the stand
Brockman told jurors he was awarded the stake in 2018 — years before the release of ChatGPT — when it was "far from certain" that OpenAI would succeed financially or technically. His testimony lasted most of Monday and was scheduled to resume Tuesday morning.
The questioning was sharp enough that U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers intervened to strike one Musk-side line that compared Brockman to "a guy who robs a bank." The judge ruled the comparison argumentative. If Brockman's holdings are valued as he described, his net worth would place him on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, in roughly the same range as Melinda French Gates.
The settlement texts that didn't make it in
The testimony arrived hours after OpenAI's lawyers filed a Sunday brief disclosing that Musk had personally texted Brockman two days before trial began, suggesting both sides walk away from the litigation. When Brockman proposed mutual dismissal, Musk allegedly replied: "By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be."
The filing did not include full copies of the conversation, and Judge Gonzalez Rogers ruled the exchange inadmissible at trial. OpenAI's lawyers nonetheless used the disclosure to argue that Musk's suit is driven by financial leverage rather than the AI safety concerns he has cited publicly — a framing that bolsters the company's countersuit.
Why it matters for the AI industry
The trial is the most consequential governance fight in the AI sector to date. A finding that OpenAI's 2019 capped-profit conversion was unlawful could threaten the structure that now underpins tens of billions in commercial commitments from Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, SoftBank and others. Conversely, a clean win for OpenAI would essentially ratify the hybrid nonprofit-plus-for-profit template that Anthropic, xAI and several frontier labs have echoed.
For enterprise customers, the immediate signal is continuity: OpenAI's leadership remains in place, deals announced over the past two weeks — including a new enterprise venture with TPG, Brookfield and Bain — are proceeding, and the model roadmap has not slipped. The longer signal, written into a single $30 billion line of testimony, is that the question of who owns frontier AI is no longer abstract.
