Musk's lawyers grill OpenAI's Brockman over diary entries revealing profit motives

OpenAI president Greg Brockman took the stand in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, where Musk’s attorney Steven Molo forced him to read aloud personal journal entries written between 2015 and 2023. The entries, particularly one from 2017, show Brockman openly weighing whether OpenAI should flip to a for-profit structure, writing that ‘making the money for us sounds great’ and explicitly asking himself what would take him to a $1 billion net worth. Brockman’s stake is now valued at roughly $30 billion after the 2018 creation of OpenAI’s for-profit arm.

Molo’s strategy aims to portray Brockman as financially motivated from the outset, undermining OpenAI’s defense that its mission-driven nonprofit origins justify its current structure. At one point, Molo asked whether Brockman would return $29 billion to the nonprofit arm and compared him to a bank robber minimizing a theft because more money remained in the vault. Brockman declined, arguing his stake predated ChatGPT’s value spike and that he helped build the world’s best-funded nonprofit.

The testimony matters because it directly tests whether OpenAI’s pivot to for-profit operations was a betrayal of its founding charter or a pragmatic evolution. Contemporaneous diary entries are uniquely damaging evidence — they capture intent in the moment, harder to reframe than retrospective testimony, and could shape how courts and regulators view the legitimacy of similar nonprofit-to-for-profit AI conversions.