Greg Brockman has a journaling habit. Like it happens often with founders, he processes his thinking by writing things down.Strategy sessions, product ideas, existential dread about the nature of artificial intelligence or any senseful ideas crossing his mind...
In November 2017, he wrote something in that own private journal that he almost certainly never imagined would matter to anyone but himself.
"I cannot believe that we committed to non profit if three months later we are doing b-Corp, then it was a lie".
That sentence, handwritten and meant for no one but for himself, is now Exhibit A in what will probably be the most consequential tech trial of the decade. And as of this Tuesday, April 28th, 2026, a jury in Oakland, California, is reading it.
The case is basically Musk versus Altman, and it is, depending on your perspective, either a billionaire's righteous crusade to save humanity's most important technology from becoming a private wealth machine, or the world's most expensive grudge match dressed up in legal language. At this point it could really be both.
It all started with a simple dinner in mid 2015. Elon Musk and Sam Altman sat down with a small group of researchers in Palo Alto with a genuinely unusual and indeed disruptive idea: what if the most powerful AI in the world was built by a nonprofit? No shareholders to answer to, no quarterly earnings calls and no incentive to cut safety corners for profit. Just a pure, open source pursuit of artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.
For this beautiful idea, Musk put in what he says was around 44 million USD over the first few years of life of that new venture. He also recruited top researchers, including a young Ilya Sutskever who was taken away from Google. The founding documents read like a manifesto from a group of people who actually believed they were doing something important, which, to be fair, they probably were.
But despite of those good beginnings, by 2018 things had suddenly soured. Musk, a dominant "animal" as very few others, wanted control and OpenAI's leadership team at the time didn't want to give it to him. He then left the board, and a year later OpenAI quietly started a new path by creating a "for profit" subsidiary, with giant Microsoft coming in with a beautiful figure of a billion dollars. With all this set up, ChatGPT finally launched in 2022, and the rest is history that everyone with a smartphone already knows.
In 2023, a few months after ChatGPT became the fastest growing consumer product ever recorded, Musk started his own AI company, xAI, and right after, by 2024, he followed by sueing OpenAI.
What makes this trial genuinely riveting, beyond the extraordinary sums of money involved, is the kind of evidence presented. Discovery in a lawsuit has a way of surfacing things that were never meant to see daylight, and this case has produced hundreds of pages of private communications from people who one day assumed they were speaking freely.
There is Brockman's diary, with its blunt admission about the nonprofit commitment, but there's also an email from 2023 in which Altman tells Musk "you are my hero" after Musk had been publicly attacking OpenAI, a detail that captures the quite strange kind of intimacy between these two. Musk's reply, submitted as evidence, reads as follows: "I hear you and it is certainly not my intention to be hurtful, for which I apologize, but the fate of civilization is at stake"
There are also late night texts from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and also internal notes showing what OpenAI's leadership said publicly versus what they were planning privately. With all this at hand, an American judge already reviewed this material and found there was enough evidence in order to send the case to trial. She specifically cited Brockman's diary and internal communications suggesting a gap between OpenAI's public commitments and its private intentions.
Musk's lawyers initially put the damages figure at the astonishing figure of 134 billion USD, a number so large it becomes almost abstract, and more recently Musk said he wants any money to go back into OpenAI's nonprofit foundation, "not into his own pockets", Whether that's principled or strategic is something reasonable people disagree on sharply as we are seeing already today in every social platform.
What is for sure not abstract is the fact that if Musk wins this claim, OpenAI's entire 2025 corporate restructuring could be unwound. Its planned IPO, expected to be one of the largest in history, could end up collapsing, and both Altman and Brockman could even be removed from their positions.
The company, currently valued at over 850 billion USD after the last round, would face fundamental questions about its legal right to exist in its current form.
In their side, OpenAI's defense is, essentially, that Musk knew exactly what was happening, was even involved in the discussions about creating a for profit structure, and actually wanted to be CEO himself. They even claim that when he realised he couldn't get total control, he walked away and everything since has been jealousy dressed up as principle. The company has openly stated yesterday that "this lawsuit has always been a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor".
Musk, for his part, posted on X yesterday morning this very hard quote in his very direct style: "Scam Altman and Greg Stockman stole a charity. Full stop"
Despite what the result is, legal scholars are watching this case with genuine curiosity because at its heart it raises a question that has never really been tested, and this question is what happens when a nonprofit built to benefit humanity becomes worth a trillion dollars.
Some law professors think it's legally puzzling that the court even allowed Musk to bring certain claims. Others think the case could establish a very important precedent for how AI companies govern themselves in the future...
The jury is expected to begin deliberations around May 12, and their verdict will be just advisory, but in a case this visible, the moral weight of what twelve ordinary citizens conclude about who lied to whom will matter well beyond the courtroom.
Whatever the outcome happens to be, one thing is already certain, and this is that a private journal entry written in 2017 by a man who was just trying to work through his thoughts has now become the most read diary in Silicon Valley history. Brockman will take the stand. Altman will take the stand. Musk will take the stand. The fate of the most powerful AI company on earth, apparently, will be decided by a group of people in Oakland who were selected specifically because they said they could remain neutral about Elon Musk. Good luck with that and let's see what happens!
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