{"id":50043,"date":"2026-05-06T02:21:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T02:21:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/the-6-biggest-revelations-from-greg-brockmans-second-day-of-testimony-in-the-openai-showdown\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T02:21:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T02:21:27","slug":"the-6-biggest-revelations-from-greg-brockmans-second-day-of-testimony-in-the-openai-showdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/the-6-biggest-revelations-from-greg-brockmans-second-day-of-testimony-in-the-openai-showdown\/","title":{"rendered":"The 6 biggest revelations from Greg Brockman&#8217;s second day of testimony in the OpenAI showdown"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69fa8331f9e4752b6d601300?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Greg Brockman in court with Sam Altman (R) last week\"\/><figcaption>Greg Brockman in court with Sam Altman (R) last week<\/p>\n<p>Bloomberg\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>OpenAI&#039;s compute costs have surged to $50 billion in 2026 from $30 million in 2017, Brockman said.<\/li>\n<li>Brockman said Musk sought a big win for OpenAI before considering any for-profit ventures.<\/li>\n<li>Musk demanded 51% of OpenAI but faced resistance from founders, leading to heated confrontations.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Greg Brockman&#039;s second day of testimony revealed many insights into Elon Musk&#039;s interactions with OpenAI&#039;s founders.<\/p>\n<p>Brockman, OpenAI&#039;s president, returned to the witness stand on Tuesday, seeking to add &quot;context&quot; to journal entries about how it would be &quot;morally bankrupt&quot; to &quot;steal&quot; the OpenAI nonprofit from Musk.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Here are the key revelations from Brockman&#039;s latest testimony.<\/p>\n<h2>Musk wanted a big win for OpenAI before entertaining a for-profit<\/h2>\n<p>In a bid to compete, Musk told the OpenAI team they needed a big win, Brockman told the jury. &quot;Once we have a big result, then and only then can we entertain the for-profit,&quot; Brockman said Musk told them.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Twenty thousand people watched the win, which Musk crowed about on Twitter, before it was renamed X.<\/p>\n<h2>Celebrating at Musk&#039;s haunted mansion with Amber Heard<\/h2>\n<p>After the big win, the OpenAI team was invited to Musk&#039;s &quot;haunted mansion&quot; in San Francisco to discuss the company&#039;s next steps, Brockman said. In his email, Musk warned of &quot;party carnage&quot; from the night before.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;There was confetti and cups and the whole thing all around,&quot; Brockman said of the scene.<\/p>\n<p>Actor Amber Heard, Musk&#039;s girlfriend at the time, was also there.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I remember Amber served some nice whiskey,&quot; Brockman said. &quot;Elon asked her to be part of the conversation. She didn&#039;t really want to,&quot; he said, adding, &quot;But we had a conversation about the for-profit, and it was a very celebratory moment.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>Musk said he deserved more because he had more money<\/h2>\n<p>Musk wanted a controlling, 51% equity stake in OpenAI and to be its CEO, Brockman told the jury.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;He said he deserved more because he had started the most multi-billion-dollar companies in history, that he had zero failures,&quot; Brockman testified.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Look, you guys are great,&quot; Brockman said, quoting Musk. &quot;But I can start another AI company tomorrow, like in one tweet.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>This was something the rest of the founders \u2014 Brockman, Sutskever, and Altman \u2014 objected to.<\/p>\n<h2>The breakup fight with Musk<\/h2>\n<p>After that, things went downhill. The founders agreed to structural changes to the company, but they fought over the details, Brockman said.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Then the conversation turned to equity, and something really changed,&quot; said Brockman of how Musk reacted. &quot;Something just shifted in him. It was like, you could just sense it. And he was angry.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;He just sat quiet for several minutes, just thinking,&quot; Brockman added. &quot;And he said, &#039;I decline.&#039;&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Brockman said later in the testimony that he thought Musk was going to &quot;physically attack him&quot; and that Musk &quot;stormed around the table.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>Musk said he wanted to compete with the &quot;wolves&quot; at Google<\/h2>\n<p>Around the time Musk resigned from the board, he met with OpenAI&#039;s employees, Brockman said. Brockman said Musk told the team at the 2018 meeting that he was resigning because OpenAI would require &quot;billions of dollars per year&quot; and &quot;the only path&quot; he saw to make it work was to have Tesla run it.<\/p>\n<p>Musk told the group that in pursuing artificial intelligence at Tesla, &quot;he would not work on safety,&quot; Brockman said. &quot;He said the most important thing would be to catch up to DeepMind,&quot; Brockman said, speaking of Google&#039;s AI lab.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;If the sheep are dictating safety and the wolves are not, there would be no purpose,&quot; Brockman recalled Musk saying.<\/p>\n<h2>OpenAI&#039;s compute costs have skyrocketed<\/h2>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>According to Reuters, Brockman said that the ChatGPT maker&#039;s computing costs have surged from roughly $30 million in 2017 to tens of billions of dollars this year.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We went down the list of the Forbes 500, the wealthiest people in America, and tried to find people excited about AI,&quot; said Brockman as he detailed the difficulty of OpenAI&#039;s fundraising efforts back when it was still a nonprofit.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Greg Brockman in court with Sam Altman (R) last week Bloomberg\/Bloomberg via Getty Images OpenAI&#039;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, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50044,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-50043","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}