In court against OpenAI, Elon Musk casts himself as humanity's chief defender

On April 28, 2026, at the OpenAI trial, Elon Musk bet less on documents than on his own image. Before the jurors, he tried to present himself not as an aggrieved co-founder but as a man who has spent years building companies for a single purpose: the safety of humanity.

Biography as argument

Instead of moving quickly to the heart of the dispute, Musk began with a long tour of his past. He recalled growing up in South Africa and arriving in Canada to study with 2,500 Canadian dollars in traveler's checks, a bag of clothes and books, and then walked in detail through his entire business career, from Zip2 and PayPal to SpaceX, Tesla and his other current projects. The approach did not look accidental: in court he was telling a story not about a corporate conflict but about a consistent personal mission that he supposedly has carried for decades.

Musk then tied his companies to that same thread. He described SpaceX as insurance for life as we know it, and Tesla as a response to the risk that dependence on fossil fuels poses to the environment and to people in general. In court he even made the contentious claim that he founded Tesla. But for the rhetoric in the room that was secondary: what mattered to Musk was that jurors see him not merely as a billionaire but as someone who repeatedly invests in projects with a large public purpose.

One mission for AI

Musk carried the same logic over to artificial intelligence. He said he has worried about AI risks since his student years and considers the technology a double-edged sword: it can either cure diseases and make people richer, or destroy everyone. In his framing, humanity faces two scenarios, a utopian one like Star Trek and a grim one like Terminator. That is why, by Musk's account, he took part in creating OpenAI: not for yet another startup, but in an attempt to steer the development of powerful AI in a safe direction.

This thesis matters for the whole lawsuit. Musk claims that OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit mission for the benefit of humanity and became a structure increasingly dominated by commercial interests. According to the trial materials, the suit, filed in 2024, seeks the removal of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, challenges the company's current corporate model, and raises the question of whether OpenAI had the right to depart so far from its founding principles.

• SpaceX: protecting civilization over the long term
• Tesla: reducing dependence on fossil fuels
• OpenAI: an attempt to make AI development safe
• The lawsuit: an attempt to return the company to its original mission

A blow to Altman

From this testimony Musk assembles a simple image for the jurors: he is a man who warned about the risks and sacrificed resources for the common good, while Sam Altman is a manager who steered the project in another direction. The contrast is key. If Musk speaks the language of existential threat and salvation, Altman in that frame is not a visionary but a defendant who broke a promise. For the court this is not just emotion: the more convincing the story of a betrayed mission, the easier it is to portray OpenAI's commercial turn as a deliberate breach of the original deal.

"You can't steal a charity," Musk said.

Musk did not stop there and warned that a verdict in the defendants' favor would set a dangerous precedent for the entire American charitable system. But this moral attack has a weak spot: it makes the outcome depend not only on legal documents but also on trust in the narrator himself. All the more so because Musk's critics have long pointed to the gap between his public rhetoric about saving humanity and the way his own structures distribute influence, money and control around his business interests.

What this means

The trial between Musk and OpenAI's leadership is increasingly a dispute not only over corporate structure but over the right to speak on behalf of the good of humanity. If the jurors accept Musk's version, the pressure on OpenAI will grow not only legally but in terms of reputation.

For the whole AI industry this is a signal: promises about open science, safety and a public mission may one day come back to the courtroom as verifiable obligations rather than a nice marketing layer.