Greg Brockman, the OpenAI president and Sam Altman's most consequential co-founder, took the witness stand Monday and Tuesday in the federal courthouse in Oakland, where Elon Musk's $1B+ civil case against the company is now in its second week. [1] The Tuesday testimony produced the trial's most consequential financial disclosure: OpenAI expects to spend $50 billion on computing power this year, up from approximately $30 million in 2017. [2] [3] The $50 billion figure had not previously surfaced in any OpenAI filing, public statement, or analyst call. The court is now the venue where OpenAI's procurement architecture becomes public.
Tuesday's Week 2 pivots from Musk to Brockman's journals read the procedural shift to Brockman as the trial's center. Wednesday's frame is the disclosures the cross produced. Under cross-examination by Musk attorney Steven Molo, Brockman read aloud a 2017 journal entry: "Financially, what will take me to $1B?" [1] [4] On the stand, he disclosed his current OpenAI stake is worth nearly $30 billion. [1] [5] Molo asked why he had not donated the additional $29 billion above the original $1 billion target back to OpenAI's nonprofit foundation. Brockman did not have a straightforward answer. [4]
The other 2017 entry Molo introduced — Exhibit 24 from a November 6 journal — is the document Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers cited in January when denying OpenAI's motion to dismiss. The entry described Brockman's public commitment to OpenAI's nonprofit mission as "a lie" if the company subsequently became a for-profit. [6] In separate testimony Tuesday, Brockman said Musk "got up and stormed around a table" during a 2017 OpenAI meeting and that he thought Musk was going to hit him; he also said Musk demanded majority equity in any for-profit subsidiary, and at one point told him he wanted control of the company in part to finance the building of a "city on Mars," which the SpaceX CEO had said would require $80 billion. [4] [7]
Brockman's Tuesday testimony also disclosed that Musk had enlisted several OpenAI employees to do months of unpaid work for him at Tesla on self-driving technology — a claim that, if it survives cross-examination, supports OpenAI's argument that Musk used the nonprofit as a talent funnel for his commercial enterprise. [4] Musk did not appear in court Tuesday; the atmosphere outside the courthouse, ABC reported, was noticeably calmer than during Musk's first-week testimony, with smaller crowds. [1]
The pre-trial settlement exchange Judge Rogers ruled inadmissible last weekend remained unsealed. On April 25, two days before jury selection, Musk texted Brockman to "gauge interest in settlement." [1] Brockman counter-proposed dropping individual claims against Brockman and Altman. Musk responded: "By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be." [8] The text exchange did not enter evidence; the filing that contained it became public Sunday. [1]
The structural significance of the trial — separate from the celebrity-tech-theater register the daily coverage emphasizes — is that discovery has converted OpenAI's procurement architecture into a public document at a moment when two of OpenAI's principal counterparties are running their own SEC processes. Cerebras's S-1/A discloses OpenAI as customer ($20B+ committed), lender (~$1B for warrant), and shareholder (warrant vesting tied to a $40 billion valuation). The SpaceX S-1 window, which opens later this month, will disclose Tesla's xAI conversion and SpaceX's relationship with Musk personally. The $50 billion compute number Brockman disclosed Tuesday makes both prospectuses harder to read in isolation: Cerebras's revenue depends on what fraction of OpenAI's $50 billion compute spend goes to wafer-scale engines, not just to Nvidia GPUs. SpaceX's procurement chain depends on what Musk's relationship with OpenAI actually settles into.
What this means for the Cerebras book: the OpenAI counterparty section of the S-1/A risk factors now sits next to a court transcript in which OpenAI's own president is reading aloud journal entries asking how to become a billionaire. The "deeply personal writings never meant to be public" defense — which is what Brockman's own attorney, on direct, characterized the entries as — is the framing the jury will be asked to weigh against Molo's portrayal of premeditated commercial intent. [1] OpenAI's lawyers may successfully argue that journal entries are not corporate plans. The jury will have to reconcile Brockman's private words with his public role.
The trial is scheduled to run for four weeks, with verdict expected by mid-May. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is on the witness list for the third week. Brockman concluded his testimony Tuesday. [4] What the Day 2 testimony already produced — the $50 billion compute number, the "I thought he was going to hit me" line, the Tesla unpaid-work disclosure — is the kind of discovery material analysts will fold into their CBRS pricing models for May 13 and into SpaceX's S-1 read for whenever that window opens.
Discovery is now a procurement document. The court's calendar is the Cerebras roadshow's calendar. The federal courthouse at 1301 Clay Street is, structurally, where institutional buyers learn things their analysts could not get from the prospectus.
-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco