The morning of the trial.
“There is plenty of evidence to show OpenAI’s leaders made assurances they would uphold the company’s nonprofit structure.”
— U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, January 15, 2026
On the morning of April 27, 2026, a line of people stretched around the block outside the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, on Clay Street in Oakland. It was eight-fifteen, and the marine layer had not yet burned off. The fog lay across the bay in a gray sheet, obscuring San Francisco’s skyline — those glass towers where so much of the story had begun. Inside the courthouse, courtroom four was being prepared for jury selection in Case Number 4:24-cv-04722-YGR. On the docket, the case was styled Musk v. Altman. In the press, they called it the trial of the century.
Both descriptions undersold it.
The plaintiff was Elon Musk — the richest man on Earth, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, a man who had co-founded the very organization he was now suing. The defendant, the one who mattered, was Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. The charges that had survived three motions to dismiss were breach of charitable trust, constructive fraud, fraud, and unjust enrichment.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder and president, had kept a diary. In November 2017, less than two years after the founding dinner at the Rosewood Hotel, Brockman wrote: “I cannot believe that we committed to non-profit if three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.” In another entry, he asked himself a question that would later appear on courtroom screens: “Financially what will take me to $1B?”
These were the words of a man who had helped found a nonprofit dedicated to building artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. The diary entries suggested that the commitment to that mission had lasted approximately ninety days.