Musk Contemplated Handing OpenAI to His Children, Altman Testifies

Altman was asked overseas what he thought of Musk's claim that the other co-founders of OpenAI "stole a charity" when they launched a for-profit subsidiary to commercialise products based on the company’s AI models.

"It’s hard to even wrap my head around that framing," Altman said after several seconds of silence. "We created one of the largest charitable institutions in the world. This foundation is doing amazing work and will do much more."

Musk's lawyers have been working hard to point out that OpenAI’s foundation, which now has assets of around $200 billion, did not have any full-time employees until the beginning of this year. OpenAI's board chair, Bret Taylor, testified today that it was simply due to the challenge of converting OpenAI's equity into cash, which was accomplished with the most recent restructuring of the organisation in 2025.

The central question posited by Musk's lawyers is whether the company's commitment to safety was left behind as its commercial power grew. But Altman stated that in 2017, during a critical period when the founders struggled with how to secure funding to feed their AI models, Musk's "specific safety plans worried me".

He described a "particularly hair-raising moment" in the debate, when Musk was asked what would happen if he died while controlling a hypothetical for-profit OpenAI. In Altman's narrative, Musk said, "maybe OpenAI should pass to my children".

Altman remarked that Musk's focus on controlling early profits gave him pause because OpenAI was dedicated to keeping advanced AI out of the hands of a single person, and Altman, with his experience running the prominent startup accelerator Y Combinator, knew that "founders who had control generally did not relinquish it".

Altman also testified that Musk’s management tactics, which may have worked for engineering and manufacturing, did not work at OpenAI.

"I think Mr Musk didn’t understand how to run a good research lab," Altman said. "He demotivated some of our most important researchers. At one point, he demanded that Greg and Ilya make a list of the researchers and list their achievements and rank them and chainsaw through a bunch. This caused enormous damage to the culture of the organisation for a long time."

Indeed, Altman positioned himself as advocating for the "sweat equity" of fellow co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, the two individuals who effectively managed OpenAI at the time, while Musk and Altman had other jobs.

After this confrontation went unresolved, Musk eventually left OpenAI’s board and began competing with AI initiatives at Tesla and his own AI startup, xAI. But Altman kept in touch with the mercurial entrepreneur, updating him about OpenAI's work and seeking his funding and advice.

OpenAI's lawyers noted that Musk had been kept in the loop and asked to participate in the investments that his lawsuits now claim have corrupted the non-profit organisation.

During a discussion about a Microsoft investment in OpenAI in 2018, Altman said that "unlike many meetings with Mr Musk, this was a good vibes meeting", where Musk spent a "long time showing us memes on his phone".