During day four of his federal trial against OpenAI, Elon Musk testified that most cryptocurrencies are scams, claimed he was fooled into funding an $800 billion for-profit empire, and accused Sam Altman of looting a nonprofit built on his money and reputation.
The courtroom in Oakland, California, is not where most people expected the most consequential legal battle in the history of artificial intelligence to play out. But there Elon Musk sat on April 29, under oath, telling a federal jury that he contributed $38 million in essentially free funding to a startup that became worth $800 billion, and that the people who built that empire on his money lied to him about what they intended to do with it. "I was a fool," he told the jury. That single sentence, delivered by one of the world's wealthiest people, captures the strange emotional register of this entire trial.
The case is Musk v. OpenAI, and it has been building toward this moment since Musk filed suit in 2024. His central claim is that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, his co-founders at OpenAI, violated the nonprofit charter under which the organisation was established. Musk contends they accepted his early funding, built credibility using the nonprofit label, and then executed a quiet conversion to a for-profit model backed by Microsoft, now valued at approximately $850 billion. He is seeking up to $134 billion in damages and wants OpenAI forced to revert to its original nonprofit structure, with Altman and Brockman removed from their roles. The judge has already noted the damages figure appears to have been pulled from the air. She will make the final ruling, guided but not bound by the jury's advisory findings, expected by late May.
OpenAI's defence is direct. The company argues that Musk supported the for-profit transition at various stages, that he left the organisation because he could not gain full control, and that his lawsuit is designed to damage a direct competitor to xAI, his own artificial intelligence company. OpenAI's lawyers surfaced emails and texts during cross-examination that showed Musk had, at minimum, expected "initial control" and a large ownership stake in exchange for his financial contributions. The implication being pushed by OpenAI's legal team is that Musk's grievance is not really about nonprofit integrity. It is about not getting what he thought he had negotiated.
The crypto remark arrived as a sidebar during questioning about Musk's broader views on technology and financial assets. Asked to characterise his relationship with cryptocurrency, Musk told the jury: "Some of them have merit, but most of them are scams." He went on to clarify his support for Bitcoin specifically, noting that his past enthusiasm for Dogecoin was different in nature. For anyone tracking Musk's influence on crypto markets over the past five years, the statement lands with a particular weight. Tesla's $1.5 billion Bitcoin purchase in early 2021, his Dogecoin promotions, his repeated on-and-off commentary about various tokens, all of it has moved markets and shaped retail behaviour at enormous scale. His courtroom testimony positions most of that market as fraudulent activity, which is arguably what a significant number of people who lost money in the 2022 crash already believed.
The trial is also a window into how OpenAI actually formed. Musk testified that he conceived the idea, chose the name, recruited key people, and provided all the initial funding. He described the founding as driven by genuine concern about AI safety and the unchecked power of Google in the field. He framed OpenAI's mission as a corrective, a lab that would develop frontier AI in the open, for the benefit of humanity rather than shareholder return. What he got instead, his lawyers argue, was a vehicle that used the nonprofit halo to attract talent and credibility, then discarded it when the commercial opportunity became clear. His attorney's framing is blunt: they stole a charity.
What hangs over the whole proceeding is OpenAI's current trajectory. The company completed its conversion to a for-profit public benefit corporation last year. It has discussed IPO timelines. Its valuation has been cited in court at figures ranging from $800 billion to $850 billion. The nonprofit entity that Musk helped found still exists on paper, but its relevance to the commercial enterprise that bears the OpenAI name has been debated by legal scholars since the Microsoft investment was first announced in 2019. Whether that conversion constituted a breach of promise, or simply a pragmatic evolution of a research organisation that outgrew its founding structure, is precisely what Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is being asked to decide.
The outcome will matter well beyond the two principals. If Musk prevails, it sets a precedent for how founders can be bound to the stated missions of charitable technology organisations, even as those organisations scale into commercial giants. If OpenAI prevails, it effectively ratifies the conversion model and removes a significant legal tool from anyone looking to challenge similar transitions in the future. The AI industry is watching this trial very carefully. The nonprofit-to-profit pipeline has become standard in frontier research. The question of whether that pipeline is legally permissible is now being answered in a federal courtroom in Oakland, one piece of testimony at a time.
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