Elon Musk presses OpenAI in court as Sam Altman defends the company's structure

The courtroom battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI has entered its toughest phase: on the second day of the trial, the company's lawyers subjected the billionaire to an aggressive cross-examination. At the center of the dispute are the promises made when OpenAI was founded, and the question of whether the company had the right to build a commercial structure around a nonprofit core.

How the questioning went

On April 29, in federal court in Oakland, Musk again repeated his central argument: in his telling, Sam Altman "stole a charitable mission" from OpenAI and steered the project toward a model that threatens both its original principles and AI safety. But within minutes, OpenAI's lawyers took the initiative. They walked Musk through old emails and notes, trying to show that he himself had discussed a commercial form and knew of such plans long before the conflict.

The cross-examination quickly turned tense. Musk argued over phrasing, dodged direct answers and said several times that the questions were designed to trap him. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers intervened more than once and demanded simple answers: "yes" or "no." One of the most notable moments came when Musk tried to challenge the closed-question format itself and launched into a long comparison, after which the judge cut him off.

"Your questions are designed to confuse me,"

Musk snapped at OpenAI's lawyers.

What the parties dispute

Musk's lawsuit rests on the idea that when OpenAI was founded in 2015, it was meant to be a nonprofit developing powerful AI for the benefit of humanity, not investors. In Musk's account, Altman and Greg Brockman violated that understanding, moved the project into a for-profit orbit and gained personally. OpenAI pushes back hard: it says Musk knew about possible commercialization, left after a failed attempt to take control of the organization, and is now acting out of jealousy and calculation.

• Musk demands that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman be removed from leadership
• He wants the current for-profit structure around OpenAI undone
• The lawsuit seeks $134 billion in compensation for the nonprofit arm
• OpenAI's defense insists that the $38 million Musk contributed was a donation, not a stake in control

OpenAI's lawyers also raised episodes from the past that are awkward for Musk: correspondence about creating a commercial superstructure, discussions inside Neuralink, and his attempts to lure OpenAI employees to Tesla. A 2017 letter surfaced in court in which Musk acknowledged that the nonprofit form might have been the wrong decision. For the defense, this is the key argument: if Musk himself contemplated such a turn, the current lawsuit looks less like a defense of ideals and more like a fight over power and control.

Why the stakes are high

All of Silicon Valley is watching the case, because more than the reputations of the two most prominent figures in the AI industry is at stake. The ruling could hit OpenAI's governance structure just as the company prepares to go public in the US later in 2026 at a valuation of around $1 trillion. Any forced restructuring, change of leadership or limit on the commercial model could sharply alter the company's trajectory, its relations with investors and its pace of product releases.

A separate layer of the conflict is the fight over how to interpret OpenAI's history. Musk says he long believed Altman's promises to keep the project nonprofit, paid for rent and kept funding it, until he realized after the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 that he had been deceived. OpenAI offers a different version: Musk left the board back in 2018, when he failed to push through a merger with Tesla and gain more influence. For the jury, this fork will be one of the main issues. The court expects the proceedings to take about three weeks.

What this means

For the market, this is not just a personal war between Musk and Altman. The court is testing whether a company can speak of a mission serving humanity while building an extremely expensive AI company with a valuation near $1 trillion. Whatever the verdict, it will become a reference point for the whole industry: investors, founders and regulators will look differently at how to structure AI projects that promise public benefit.