• OpenAI's compute costs have surged to $50 billion in 2026 from $30 million in 2017, Brockman said.

• Brockman said Musk sought a big win for OpenAI before considering any for-profit ventures.

• Musk demanded 51% of OpenAI but faced resistance from founders, leading to heated confrontations.

Greg Brockman's second day of testimony revealed many insights into Elon Musk's interactions with OpenAI's founders.

Brockman, OpenAI's president, returned to the witness stand on Tuesday, seeking to add "context" to journal entries about how it would be "morally bankrupt" to "steal" the OpenAI nonprofit from Musk.

Musk is seeking more than $100 billion in damages from OpenAI in the high-stakes trial, where he said the company deceived him and that its founders, including Brockman, unjustly enriched themselves.

Here are the key revelations from Brockman's latest testimony.

Musk wanted a big win for OpenAI before entertaining a for-profit

In a bid to compete, Musk told the OpenAI team they needed a big win, Brockman told the jury. "Once we have a big result, then and only then can we entertain the for-profit," Brockman said Musk told them.

Brockman says the team finally got their win in 2017 when an OpenAI bot defeated a top player in the video game Dota 2 on an international stage.

Twenty thousand people watched the win, which Musk crowed about on Twitter, before it was renamed X.

Celebrating at Musk's haunted mansion with Amber Heard

After the big win, the OpenAI team was invited to Musk's "haunted mansion" in San Francisco to discuss the company's next steps, Brockman said. In his email, Musk warned of "party carnage" from the night before.

"There was confetti and cups and the whole thing all around," Brockman said of the scene.

Actor Amber Heard, Musk's girlfriend at the time, was also there.

"I remember Amber served some nice whiskey," Brockman said. "Elon asked her to be part of the conversation. She didn't really want to," he said, adding, "But we had a conversation about the for-profit, and it was a very celebratory moment."

Musk said he deserved more because he had more money

Musk wanted a controlling, 51% equity stake in OpenAI and to be its CEO, Brockman told the jury.

"He said he deserved more because he had started the most multi-billion-dollar companies in history, that he had zero failures," Brockman testified.

"Look, you guys are great," Brockman said, quoting Musk. "But I can start another AI company tomorrow, like in one tweet."

This was something the rest of the founders — Brockman, Sutskever, and Altman — objected to.

The breakup fight with Musk

After that, things went downhill. The founders agreed to structural changes to the company, but they fought over the details, Brockman said.

Brockman recalled a meeting in August 2017 where they told Musk they would each be getting founding shares. If Musk wanted additional shares, he could pay the market price.

"Then the conversation turned to equity, and something really changed," said Brockman of how Musk reacted. "Something just shifted in him. It was like, you could just sense it. And he was angry."

"He just sat quiet for several minutes, just thinking," Brockman added. "And he said, 'I decline.'"

Brockman said later in the testimony that he thought Musk was going to "physically attack him" and that Musk "stormed around the table."

Musk said he wanted to compete with the "wolves" at Google

Around the time Musk resigned from the board, he met with OpenAI's employees, Brockman said. Brockman said Musk told the team at the 2018 meeting that he was resigning because OpenAI would require "billions of dollars per year" and "the only path" he saw to make it work was to have Tesla run it.

Musk told the group that in pursuing artificial intelligence at Tesla, "he would not work on safety," Brockman said. "He said the most important thing would be to catch up to DeepMind," Brockman said, speaking of Google's AI lab.

"If the sheep are dictating safety and the wolves are not, there would be no purpose," Brockman recalled Musk saying.

OpenAI's compute costs have skyrocketed

OpenAI expects to spend about $50 billion on computing power in 2026, Brockman said when addressing the amount of funding OpenAI would need to stay competitive.

According to Reuters, Brockman said that the ChatGPT maker's computing costs have surged from roughly $30 million in 2017 to tens of billions of dollars this year.

"We went down the list of the Forbes 500, the wealthiest people in America, and tried to find people excited about AI," said Brockman as he detailed the difficulty of OpenAI's fundraising efforts back when it was still a nonprofit.

Read the original article on Business Insider

OpenAI’s former head of technology Mira Murati slammed CEO Sam Altman as an untrustworthy leader who fomented strife among the company’s top ranks — stunning testimony that was shared Wednesday in Elon Musk’s bombshell lawsuit against the artificial intelligence giant.

Altman created an environment where OpenAI executives were pitted against each other, creating “chaos” in a way that “undermined” her ability to do her job, Murati alleged.

“My concern was about Sam saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person,” she said in taped testimony played in Oakland, Calif., federal court.

When asked if she felt that Altman was not always candid with her, Murati replied, “Not always.”

“My issues with Sam were very much around management,” she added.

The testimony came in the second week of a trial that has gripped Silicon Valley and beyond. Musk’s suit accuses Altman and OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman of betraying the company’s founding contract by putting commercial gain over creating AI for public benefit. The ChatGPT maker has rejected the allegations, claiming Musk actually supported its transformation into a for-profit business.

The Tesla titan is seeking up to $180 billion in damages and a court order for OpenAI to unwind its for-profit status. Musk also wants Altman booted from the company’s board. In his own testimony last week, he said he’d been a “fool” to trust Altman with the future of the company.

After Altman was temporarily fired by the board of directors in November 2023, Murati briefly served as CEO. She has since left OpenAI and co-founded her own AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab.

Still, she said in her testimony that she previously supported an effort to bring Altman back as CEO, pressing board members for a fuller explanation for why they’d ousted him.

“I realized the board had not followed a process that could be trusted with regards to firing Sam,” Murati said. “As we can see in retrospect, the way [board members] handled it caused complete and utter chaos.”

Murati — who was seen in a glam dress at Monday’s Met Gala in Manhattan — detailed the chaos surrounding Altman’s ouster and how it threatened the company’s future.

“OpenAI was at catastrophic risk of falling apart,” she said. “I was concerned about the company completely blowing up.” 

The exec added that she kept in close contact with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during the tumultuous time. Text messages were displayed showing she texted him asking that he call her to coordinate “how to talk with sam here.”

Murati called Nadella a “voice of reason,” adding, “it was kind of a crazy situation.”

Microsoft said last month it was no longer paying part of its revenue to OpenAI, the latest in a series of steps to loosen a close partnership between the firms.

Murati said competing AI companies – specifically Google and Musk’s AI outfits – tried to swoop in to poach OpenAI staff amid the chaos of Altman’s firing and eventual rehiring. 

“Very important we don’t lose researches to Demis or Elon,” Murati texted Nadella, referring to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google’s DeepMind.

Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner took some shots at Murati in a video testimony that was also played Wednesday in court, describing her as two-faced about Altman’s firing.

“She was waiting to see which way the wind would blow,” Toner said, adding that Murati was “not willing to stick her neck out” and implied she was worried about “blowback for her career.”

The Post’s owner, News Corp, has a content-licensing deal with OpenAI.

Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and the mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, took the stand on Wednesday as one of the most highly anticipated witnesses in Musk’s case against OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker has argued that, while Zilis worked with OpenAI from 2016 to 2023, she was also involved in a secret relationship with Musk, acting as an informant for him.

Musk’s case against OpenAI alleges that the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, and president, Greg Brockman, co-founders of the company with Musk, broke a founding agreement when they restructured it from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise. The Tesla CEO accuses Altman and Brockman of unjustly enriching themselves and wants both removed from their positions at the startup, one of the most valuable in the world. He is also seeking the undoing of the for-profit restructuring and $134bn in damages to be redistributed to OpenAI’s non-profit arm.

OpenAI rejects all of Musk’s allegations and over the course of the trial, now in its second week, has tried to prove that he was always on board with the intentions to shift to a for-profit structure. The company’s lawyers have argued that Musk was essentially a sore loser who left the company in 2018 after a failed bid for control and was seeking vengeance due to OpenAI’s success.

Zilis has become an important figure in the case, as she served as a link between Musk and OpenAI’s board, which she served on from 2020 to 2023. In pre-trial filings, OpenAI’s lawyers questioned the exact nature of Zilis’s relationship with Musk and presented communications to suggest she was working as an inside source for him after he left the company. She met Musk through her work at OpenAI.

“Do you prefer I stay close and friendly to OpenAI to keep info flowing or begin to disassociate? Trust game is about to get tricky so any guidance on how to do right by you is appreciated,” Zilis texted Musk in 2018, according to court filings.

“Close and friendly, but we are going to actively try to move three or four people from OpenAI to Tesla. More than that will join over time, but we won’t actively recruit them,” Musk responded.

Meanwhile, Zilis remained on good terms with OpenAI’s leadership. A 2023 text from Altman to Zilis suggests that he was seeking her advice on how to influence Musk – asking her: “BTW, good idea for me to tweet something nice about Elon?”

Zilis, 40, took on a role as project director at Tesla in 2017, and when she joined OpenAI’s board, she was its youngest member. She is now an executive at Musk’s brain-implant startup Neuralink.

During her testimony, Zilis said many ideas were thrown around in OpenAI’s early years about how to structure the non-profit and whether to create a for-profit entity. She said she initially agreed with a for-profit branch and billion-dollar investments from Microsoft because it would help fulfill OpenAI’s founding mission.

When Musk left OpenAI’s board in February 2018, Zilis testified, during this “tricky half breakup” she played the role of facilitator with OpenAI.

“They were kind of bad at speaking to each other,” she said. “My role historically had been to facilitate communication between all of the major parties to make a maximal alignment between them.”

Altman invited Zilis to join the board in 2020 and she said she agreed because she “spent the last decade of my life of wanting AI to go well for humanity”. When asked whether she funneled information to Musk while on the board, she responded: “Funnel? Certainly not.”

Romantic relationship with Musk

The extent of Zilis’s personal relationship with Musk wasn’t publicly known until 2022, when Business Insider reported that she had had twins with Musk the year before.

The case has revealed additional information about Zilis and Musk’s relationship: the two became romantically involved around 2016, according to Zilis’s testimony, and she lives in a house in Austin, Texas, where he sometimes stays when visiting their children. Zilis said that she decided to have children with Musk around the end of 2020 when he told her he would “be happy to make a donation”. They now have four children together.

When Musk took the stand last week, he referred to Zilis as the mother of his children. He also testified that he lives with Zilis. The couple has been seen more recently holding hands and attending events together, including dinners with Donald Trump at the White House and Mar-a-Lago.

During Zilis’s testimony, she said that she first became enthralled with AI as a 13-year-old growing up in the suburbs of a town in Ontario, Canada. She said she read the book Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, which is about AI merging with human consciousness.

“I read it 10 to 15 times and it never left me from there,” Zilis said. “AI is going to be the most influential thing humanity creates.”

Zilis said she went to college at Yale University and, immediately after, started working in the tech industry, first at IBM and eventually landing as an adviser at OpenAI in 2016. It was there that she met Musk, when he was standing outside the office one day talking to Altman. By mid-2017, Zilis had begun working for Musk at Tesla and Neuralink.

She said her job was to “go find the bottlenecks and go help solve them”. Zilis said she worked 80- to 100-hour weeks: “It was just bananas.”

Brockman was also questioned about Zilis and her role at the company when he testified earlier this week. He said Zilis was a friend of his, whom he met around 2012 or 2013, and that she later went to work for Musk.

Brockman said that after Musk left OpenAI in 2018, Zilis was “kind of our proxy Elon in some ways” and “very” involved in the restructuring of OpenAI into a for-profit entity. When Zilis gave birth to twins in 2021, Brockman said she didn’t say who the father was and he had no idea about her romantic relationship with Musk. Brockman testified that he found out about it in the news.

At the time, “she said that it was via IVF and that it was entirely platonic with Elon”, Brockman said.

Zilis testified that she had signed a confidentiality agreement with Musk to not disclose they had children together, but that, when she was contacted by Business Insider about the story, she told OpenAI immediately. “First call was to my dad,” Zilis said. “The next call was to Sam Altman.”

OpenAI’s board voted to let her stay on, but she eventually left when Musk started his own, competing AI company, xAI, in 2023. One of the documents that came up during Zilis’s testimony was a text exchange with her friend about this turn of events.

“E’s effort has become well known,” Zilis texted.

“Fuck,” the friend responded. “You ok.”

“When the father of your babies starts a competitive effort and will recruit out of openai there’s nothing to be done,” Zilis replied.

Shivon Zilis, Elon Musk’s romantic partner and the mother of four of his children, testified Wednesday in his explosive lawsuit against OpenAI – fielding questions about whether she “funneled” information to Musk while she was sitting on the artificial intelligence giant’s board.

“I had an allegiance to the best outcome of AI for humanity,” said Zilis, who is currently an executive at Musk’s brain implant firm Neuralink and previously worked for Tesla.

Zilis met Musk in 2016 while she was volunteering at OpenAI as an advisor. She joined its board in 2020, about two years after Musk cut ties with the firm.

The 40-year-old Canadian venture capitalist insisted that she acted independently while she sat on OpenAI’s board from 2020 to 2023 – despite sharing three children with the entrepreneur during that time. Musk and Zilis went on to have a fourth child together.

But Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, testified Tuesday that Zilis initially hid that Musk was the father of her twins born in November 2021 – claiming he only found out it was Musk through news reports.

Brockman said when he asked Zilis about it, she said the twins were born through IVF and that her relationship with Musk was platonic.

OpenAI and its legal team have argued Zilis acted as a close adviser to Musk, and was often consulted when the billionaire couldn’t be reached.

Wednesday’s testimony marked the most intimate facts about Musk to surface since the trial began last week, captivating Silicon Valley and beyond.

The world’s richest man is squaring off against rivals Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, and Brockman, accusing them of ripping him off by accepting $38 million in funding to build up the firm as a nonprofit – only to later turn the company into a for-profit venture.

Musk is asking federal court in Oakland, Calif., to remove Altman and Brockman from the company, award up to $180 billion in damages and reverse OpenAI’s recent restructuring – even one of which steps could upend one of the largest and most influential AI startups in the world.

OpenAI has argued that Musk knew about the plan to transform into a for-profit vehicle, and even supported the idea before his departure from the company.

On Wednesday, OpenAI’s lawyer Sarah Eddy displayed notes that Zilis had taken at a party Musk hosted in 2017 that the attorney said showed Musk was part of discussions to make OpenAI a for-profit entity.

“Switch to for profit in next couple of weeks (woah, fast!). Keep subset of people at openai nonprofit, likely safety and regulation oriented, but [Elon] wanted some coders there too Elon and sam a to lock down server agreement with satya,” the noted read, referring to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Zilis testified that she and Musk briefly started a romantic relationship after meeting in 2016, and that she went on to work for several of his ventures.

Around 2020, Musk offered to donate sperm to Zilis because he wanted everyone around him to have more children, according to her testimony. At one point, she grew emotional discussing autoimmune issues that made it difficult for her to have long-term relationships.

Eddy questioned Zilis on what she meant in a text exchange in which she asked Musk whether she should stay “close and friendly” with OpenAI in order to “keep info flowing.” Musk replied at the time, “Close and friendly,” according to court documents.

After claiming in earlier deposition statements that she didn’t recall the exchange, Zilis said Wednesday that Musk and OpenAI were “going through a weird half-breakup” and she wanted to help both parties “maintain max alignment,” a role she had historically played.

Zilis explained the text exchange as “just trying to get a read on where his head was at.”

Musk – who has had at least 14 children with four different mothers – has frequently said that “population collapse” is one of the top issues facing the world today. 

Zilis said she initially kept the fact that Musk was the father a secret to protect the children from security threats, but told OpenAI’s board about his paternity after a news story broke in 2022.

Musk testified last week that he lives with Zilis, and he has publicly referred to her as his “partner.”

When Musk set up shop at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Fla., residence soon after the 2024 election, Zilis was also a mainstay at the property. She also appeared by Musk’s side during Trump’s January 2025 inauguration.

Zilis also joined Musk during a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington, DC, in February of that year. The pair brought along two of their children and Musk’s son X from his previous relationship with pop star Grimes.

Also in February 2025, Zilis posted a photo on social media of her with their twins, and Musk posted a heart emoji in the comments.

The Post’s owner, News Corp, has a content-licensing deal with OpenAI.

Additional reporting by Marc Vartabedian.