Elon Musk expected to testify in OpenAI trial

Artificial intelligenceElon Musk expected to testify in OpenAI trial“Without Elon Musk there would be no OpenAI, pure and simple,” Steven Molo, Musk’s lawyer, told the court on Tuesday.Listen to this article with a free account00:0000:00Elon Musk arrives in court Tuesday for the trial in connection with his lawsuit against OpenAI at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland, Calif.Benjamin Fanjoy / Getty ImagesShareAdd NBC News to GoogleApril 28, 2026, 1:10 PM EDTBy Shanshan Dong and Angela YangOAKLAND, California — Elon Musk is set to testify in court as soon as Tuesday in his legal showdown against Sam Altman.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.The outcome of the trial could determine the future of OpenAI, the tech giant that the two billionaires co-founded as a nonprofit in 2015. Musk, who left the board of OpenAI in 2018, seeks to stop the ChatGPT maker from becoming a for-profit company — having publicly accused OpenAI of becoming a “closed source, profit-maximizer.”“Without Elon Musk there would be no OpenAI, pure and simple,” Steven Molo, Musk’s lawyer, told the court in his opening argument on Tuesday.Jury selection wrapped up on Monday for a trial scheduled to run for four weeks. Witnesses are expected to include not only Musk, the CEO of xAI, Tesla and SpaceX, and Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, but possibly also Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, top AI researchers, and current and former OpenAI board members.OpenAI completed its restructuring in October. Its reimagined for-profit entity, which continues to be controlled by a nonprofit foundation, removed its profit cap and later raised $122 billion in its latest funding round. Musk, in his lawsuit against Altman, has claimed that OpenAI’s transformation “requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators, and lying to the public.”Musk, who claims OpenAI benefited from his money, advice, recruiting efforts and conn...