This week saw the start of one of the most important and revealing trials of the AI era. And based on the sheer candor of what the parties are saying to each other, I think people will be dissecting this case for years — the way they still dissect the Abramovich v. Berezovsky saga.
Today Elon Musk gave his first testimony in the lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. Musk's position: the lab was conceived from the start as a strictly nonprofit organization, whose purpose was to save humanity from the robot uprising.
Fear of AI and "looting a charity"
Taking the stand as the first witness, Musk explained to the jury that artificial intelligence is too dangerous a technology to be controlled unilaterally by an ordinary corporation (at the time he was especially worried about a Google monopoly).
That, he said, is exactly why he helped found OpenAI. Musk testified that he wanted to prevent events from playing out like a sci-fi action movie — what he called a "Terminator-style outcome" — and steer the technology toward a "Star Trek" scenario instead.
He also shared a revealing backstory. It turns out Musk decided to create the company because of a personal grievance:
> OpenAI only exists because Larry Page [Google co-founder] called me a "speciesist" — someone who puts the interests of biological humans above digital life forms of the future.
Up until that point, Musk and Page had been close friends — Elon regularly slept over at Page's house in Palo Alto. Their friendship ended during an argument at Musk's birthday party in 2015. When Musk raised concerns that AI could destroy humanity, Page waved it off as just "the next stage of evolution" and accused Musk of being biased toward humans.
In the 2026 courtroom, Musk made clear he feels betrayed twice over — first by Page, and now by OpenAI's leadership, which in his view turned his "lifeline for humanity" into an ordinary for-profit company.
Musk was also blunt about OpenAI's commercialization and its partnership with Microsoft. He accused his former colleagues of turning the organization into a "wealth machine," betraying its founding ideals:
> If we normalize the looting of charities, the entire foundation of philanthropy in America will be destroyed. That's what concerns me.
Social media sparring and a sharp rebuke from the judge
The trial didn't stay drama-free outside the courtroom either. Shortly before the hearings began, Musk posted several times on his platform X, referring to his opponent as "Scam Altman."
That prompted U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to issue a stern warning to both sides. She demanded the billionaires stop the public attacks, dressing them down right there in the courtroom:
> Try to control your tendency to use social media to escalate things outside this courtroom... Perhaps you have never done this before.
The judge offered to start fresh with a "clean slate," to which Musk, Altman, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman agreed, promising to keep public commentary to a minimum.
The legal battle has only just begun, but it's already clear that what's at stake is not just the reputations of Silicon Valley's biggest names — it's the legal precedents that will shape how the most advanced AI technologies get built in the future.