The first week of Musk v. Altman is in the books, and it delivered. For three days, Elon Musk sat in the witness stand at the federal courthouse in Oakland. What emerged was a mix of confessions, existential debates about AI safety, and a judge who eventually ran out of patience.
Musk’s core argument
“I was a fool who provided them free funding to create a startup,” Musk told the jury. He said he donated $38 million to build a nonprofit dedicated to safe AI — not to make Sam Altman and Greg Brockman rich. That donation, he argued, became an $800 billion company.
Musk described three phases of his relationship with OpenAI: enthusiastic support, growing distrust, and finally the conviction that “they’re looting the nonprofit.”
The bombshell: xAI distills OpenAI
The moment that drew audible gasps in the courtroom: Musk admitted that his own AI company, xAI, “partly” distills OpenAI’s models. Distillation means training a smaller model on the outputs of a larger one — the exact practice OpenAI itself has sharply criticized DeepSeek for.
“It is standard practice to use other AIs to validate your AI,” Musk argued in his defense. Whether the jury buys that framing remains to be seen.
The judge loses patience
When Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo argued that AI could wipe out humanity, and OpenAI’s lawyer William Savitt countered that Musk is building the exact same thing with xAI, the debate escalated. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers cut in sharply: “This is not a trial on whether or not artificial intelligence has damaged humanity.”
She also pointed out that there are “plenty of people who don’t want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands.”
What else happened
OpenAI’s lawyer Savitt presented emails showing Musk actively poaching OpenAI employees for Tesla and Neuralink back in 2017. “The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me. But it had to be done,” Musk wrote to a Tesla vice president at the time.
Next week, Greg Brockman takes the stand, along with AI researcher Stuart Russell from UC Berkeley.
What’s at stake
Musk is seeking to revert OpenAI to a nonprofit structure, remove Altman and Brockman from their roles, and recover roughly $130 billion in damages. The jury’s verdict will advise the judge on her decision — and could jeopardize OpenAI’s planned IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion.
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