The lives of billionaire tech titans Elon Musk and Sam Altman have been picked apart in public for decades.
But Musk’s ongoing courtroom battle against the OpenAI CEO — he claims Altman betrayed the company’s nonprofit mission — is flushing out new details about their personal lives and leadership failings.
From bitter board uprisings to secret sperm donations, here are some of the more fascinating tidbits revealed at Musk v Altman, soon to begin its third week before a federal jury in Oakland, California.
Elon Musk worried about AI — and Google
Musk told the jury that he donated millions to OpenAI because artificial intelligence, in the wrong hands, could lead to a “Terminator” scenario in which “AI kills us all.”
Google, he said, was also a key reason he helped fund the nonprofit dedicated to advancing AI in a way that would benefit humanity.
“I thought it was extremely important to have a counterbalance to Google,” Musk said, adding, “Google did not seem to care about AI safety at that time.”
But when leaving OpenAI to start his own AI venture, Musk also pointed to Google — only this time as the reason he would not prioritize safety, OpenAI president Greg Brockman told the jury.
“He said the most important thing would be to catch up to Deepmind,” Brockman said, referring Google’s AI lab.
To do that, Musk said, AI safety would have to take a back seat, Brockman told jurors, adding that Musk referred to Google as the “wolves” and AI safety advocates as “the sheep” who would become irrelevant unless they became wolves themselves.
Elon Musk’s “maniac mode” didn’t always play well
Shivon Zilis — a decade-long exec at Musk’s businesses and mother to four of his children — laughed and said “maniac mode, mostly,” when asked on the witness stand to describe his work ethic.
Musk’s leadership style also took some hits at trial, notably from Altman loyalist and current OpenAI President Greg Brockman.
“Elon has a reputation of being an extremely hard driver, and it’s not appropriate for an AI research environment,” Brockman told the jury of working with Musk in the company’s early years.
He said he and cofounder Ilya Sutskever rebelled when Musk — in a moment of DOGE-cuts foreshadowing — asked that they tell all OpenAI employees to make lists of their contributions. Those who had not made major contributions would be fired.
“Everyone joining OpenAI was worried about this happening, that they would have to go work for Tesla,” Brockman testified.
Musk had a … complicated … relationship with Shivon Zilis
Musk and Zilis’ personal ties have been known since 2022, when Business Insider broke the news that he was the father of the twin son and daughter she’d had the year before.
In sometimes emotional testimony on Wednesday, Zilis revealed new details, describing an on-and-off romantic relationship that began in 2016, the year she joined OpenAI.
She told jurors that in 2021, she accepted Musk’s offer to be a sperm-donor father. The twins were born via IVF, she said, and she was fine with him having no role in raising them.
Musk had been “encouraging everyone around him to have kids,” she testified. He told her, “That if I was ever interested, he’d be happy to make a donation.”
“We initially agreed on complete confidentiality of the donation,” Zilis told the jury. “There’s just an insane kind of, just security risk that he bears with him,” she explained.
Musk would go on to father two more of Zilis’ children, she said. And since the Business Insider story, he’s been an active parent — when not in “maniac mode.”
“We do live together when traveling, and we’ve been spending family time in Austin,” where she lives, she said. The two were photographed arriving hand in hand for an event at Mar-a-Lago in February.
Sam Altman had his own leadership woes
Back in 2023, Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI amid a chorus of bitter complaints by board members.
Testimony and exhibits have now added lively new lyrics to that chorus. At trial, Altman’s management style at the time of his ouster was described as chaotic and “conflict averse.”
“My concern was about Sam saying one thing to one person and a completely different thing to another person, and that makes it a very chaotic environment to work with,” testified Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer and now founder of Thinking Machines Lab.
Jurors watched Murati say in a video deposition that concerns about Altman are not about AI safety, but about “Sam creating chaos.”
Former OpenAI board member Tasha McCauley said she voted to fire Altman as the organization’s CEO after fielding months of complaints about him. Altman fostered “kind of a culture of lying and a culture of deceit,” she told jurors.
The OpenAI board fired Altman because they didn’t trust him
When Altman was fired — a period employees refer to as “the blip” — the board cited a lack of candor in his communications with them. At trial, jurors heard these concerns, and more, directly from board members.
McCauley testified that she felt Altman was dishonest about the launch of an artificial intelligence model, GPT4-Turbo. She said Altman wrongly said that OpenAI’s legal department told him that it didn’t need to be reviewed by an internal safety board before its launch in India.
Helen Toner, a researcher and former OpenAI board member who voted to oust Altman in 2023, said she learned about ChatGPT’s release from screenshots on Twitter, and that she wasn’t surprised because she “was used to the board not being very informed about things.”
“Put simply, Sam’s behavior and lack of transparency in his interactions with the board undermined the board’s ability to effectively supervise the company in the manner it was mandated to do,” the board said in a 2023 company communication that emerged as evidence in the trial.
Sam Altman has made a lot of employees very rich
Testifying in federal court in Oakland, Brockman said his stake in OpenAI is worth nearly $30 billion — enough to place him among the roughly 100 wealthiest people in the world. Forbes’ real-time billionaire rankings place fortunes of that size around the 80th- to 90th-richest range globally.
Brockman also confirmed that OpenAI — whose latest fundraising round valued the company at $850 billion — is exploring an initial public offering, a move that will allow investors and employees to sell their shares to the masses.
Altman has said he has zero equity in OpenAI, but the trial has revealed a web of side investments that witnesses raised concerns about conflicts of interest at the trial.
Altman is widely known to be a major investor in nuclear energy startup Helion. At trial, Zilis said she and other board members grew uncomfortable when Altman suggested a power purchase deal with Helion, whose technology is unproven.
The deal talks “felt super out of left field,” Zilis said, adding that she personally felt uneasy with the suggestion that OpenAI “place a major bet on a speculative technology.”
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