Sam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enough

At a glance:

• Sam Altman delivered what many observers considered credible testimony in the Musk v. Altman trial, describing how Elon Musk demanded total control of OpenAI's for-profit arm and planned to pass control to his children in the event of his death.
• Altman testified that OpenAI was operating on a "shoestring" with an "extremely short runway of cash" after Musk stopped his quarterly donations, and that Musk's departure "demotivated some of our key researchers" and caused "huge damage" to organizational culture.
• Despite Altman's strong courtroom performance, legal analysts suggest the trial's real aim is punishment rather than victory — and the fallout is already extending to Republican AGs and the House Oversight committee probing Altman's investments.

What Altman said on the stand

After two weeks of hearing from assorted witnesses who painted him as a lying snake, the jury finally heard from the man himself. Sam Altman took the stand in "nice kid from St. Louis" mode, doing a passable impression of someone bewildered by what was happening to him. When he stepped down holding a stack of evidence binders, he even looked a little like a schoolboy. His lawyer William Savitt asked how it felt to be accused of stealing a charity, and Altman responded: "We created, through a ton of hard work, this extremely large charity, and I agree you can't steal it. Mr. Musk did try to kill it, I guess. Twice."

Throughout the trial, Altman gave testimony that many observers found credible. He described how, after OpenAI's Dota 2 win, discussions for a for-profit arm started in earnest. "Mr. Musk felt very strongly that if we were going to form a for-profit he needed to have total control over it initially," Altman said. "He only trusted himself to make non-obvious decisions that were going to turn out to be correct."

Musk's control demands and succession plans

Altman testified that he was uncomfortable with Musk's insistence on control — not just because Musk hadn't been as involved as everyone else, but because OpenAI existed precisely so that no one person would control AGI. At Y Combinator, where he was president, Altman had seen plenty of control fights; founders could retain control forever through structures like supervoting shares. His example was not the most famous one (Mark Zuckerberg at Meta) but Musk himself and SpaceX.

When Altman asked Musk about succession plans for OpenAI, he received what he described as a "hair-raising" answer: in the event of Musk's death, control should pass to his children. "I haven't thought about it a ton, but maybe control should pass to my children," Musk reportedly said. A 2017 email from Altman to Shivon Zilis, obtained during the trial, captured his own concerns: "I am worried about control. I don't think any one person should have control of the world's first AGI — in fact the whole reason we started OpenAI was so that wouldn't happen." Altman went on to say he was open to "creative structures" to placate Musk, meaning he was willing to give Musk control up to specific milestones in company development.

In later video testimony from Sam Teller's deposition, it emerged that Musk no longer invests in anything he doesn't control — consistent with his long-term fixation on ensuring he couldn't be booted from his own company the way he was from PayPal. Musk also tried to recruit Altman to Tesla; texts between Altman and Teller revealed that Teller told Altman Musk was committed to beefing up Tesla's AI no matter what. Altman said he read a "vague, like, a lightweight threat" in those messages — that Musk would do this inside Tesla with or without him — but felt Tesla was primarily a car company and allowing it to acquire OpenAI would betray the organization's mission.

The texts that revealed Musk's strategy

One particularly striking piece of evidence came in Teller's testimony: texts Teller sent to Zilis at 12:40 AM on February 4th, 2018. "I don't love OpenAI continuing without Elon," Teller wrote. "Would rather disable it by recruiting the leaders."

When Musk stopped his quarterly donations, OpenAI was operating on a "shoestring" with an "extremely short runway of cash." Altman acknowledged that Musk's resignation from the board meant "people wondered if he was gonna try to take, uh, vengeance out on us or something." On the other hand, Altman said Musk had "demotivated some of our key researchers" and done "huge damage for a long time to the culture of the organization" — suggesting some staff were relieved to see him go.

The trial also surfaced that Alameda Research, the firm owned by Sam Bankman-Fried (now in prison for fraud and money laundering), was among OpenAI's donors, though the firm was not called out in the courtroom.

The cross-examination and Musk's legal strategy

On cross-examination, Steven Molo spent more than 10 minutes telling Altman that various people had called him a liar: Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati, Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley, Daniela and Dario Amodei (former OpenAI employees and founders of Anthropic), employees at Altman's first startup Loopt, a recent New Yorker article, and a book called The Optimist. Molo scored some points by asking Altman about trial testimony he said he wasn't paying close attention to, which Molo acted as though was inconceivable.

Altman kept his cool, though seeming hurt and confused by the focus on whether he was a liar. The cross-examination declined in focus precipitously after that stretch. Altman truthfully noted that CEOs are almost always on the boards of the companies they run, which undercut one of Molo's lines of attack. Observers described the lawyering from Musk's side as shoddy — Molo also made an unconvincing argument about fundraising in nonprofits, claiming that if Stanford could raise $3 billion a year, OpenAI should have remained a nonprofit. That comparison ignored Stanford's donor network of thousands of graduates, its different capital requirements, and the fact that $3 billion was the combined total of the initial two Microsoft investments — not enough to scale OpenAI to where it is now.

Why the trial might be about punishment, not victory

The core argument from the defense's side is that the point of this trial isn't to win — it's to punish Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI. Musk has done that fairly thoroughly, reinforcing in the public's mind that Altman is a liar and a snake. Even as Altman was convincing on the stand and may even win the suit, the broader damage has already been done.

The morning after Altman's testimony, an exclusive in The Wall Street Journal reported that assorted Republican AGs and the House Oversight committee wanted to look into Sam Altman's investments. References to the trial were peppered throughout the article, suggesting the legal battle is already feeding into broader political scrutiny. Altman may have won the jury's sympathy in court, but Musk's vengeance appears to have only just begun.