Greg Brockman's 2017 journal entries and an undisclosed investment conflict take center stage as the Musk v. Altman trial enters its second week in Oakland.
Greg Brockman, a co-founder and board member of OpenAI, faced cross-examination during the second week of trial in the Musk v. Altman litigation, with opposing counsel confronting him with his own handwritten journal entries from November 2017 describing a plan to "steal the nonprofit from [Musk] to convert to b corp without him" [1]. The entries, produced in discovery, now sit at the center of Elon Musk's breach-of-fiduciary-duty claim against OpenAI's leadership.
The trial is proceeding in federal court in Oakland, California, with Musk suing OpenAI, its chief executive Sam Altman, and other defendants over the organization's conversion from a nonprofit structure toward for-profit operations [1]. Musk's legal team, led by attorney Steven Molo, used the Brockman entries to argue that the pivot away from the nonprofit model was not an organic governance decision but a course of action contemplated years in advance, before Musk had formally separated from the organization.
Beyond the journal entries, Brockman acknowledged under examination that he never fulfilled a $100,000 pledge he had made to OpenAI's nonprofit, while he currently holds a stake in the for-profit entity valued at approximately $30 billion [1]. That disparity, Musk's counsel argued, illustrates a pattern in which founders extracted equity value from a charitable structure to which they had made binding commitments. Brockman also disclosed during testimony that he had invested personally in Cerebras, an AI chip company, during a period when OpenAI was evaluating whether to acquire Cerebras, and that he did not disclose that investment to the board [1]. The undisclosed conflict draws directly on fiduciary-duty doctrine requiring board members to disclose personal financial interests that intersect with corporate decisions.
The journal entries and the Cerebras disclosure represent, in combination, the most concrete documentary and testimonial evidence Musk's team has placed before the jury to date. The entries supply intent; the Cerebras omission supplies a pattern of conduct. Together they give closing-argument counsel a narrative thread that does not depend entirely on disputed oral representations about what OpenAI's founding documents promised.
The case now moves toward the close of the defense's witness presentation [1]. Closing arguments and jury deliberations will determine whether the documented record of internal discussions constitutes actionable fiduciary breach or reflects the kind of strategic planning that courts have declined to penalize in comparable nonprofit-conversion disputes.