The first sworn corroboration that Musk tried to put Sam Altman on the Tesla board came Friday afternoon in courtroom 9 of the federal courthouse on Mission Street, when Shivon Zilis — former OpenAI board member, current Neuralink executive, mother of three of Musk's children — answered Brockman's counsel with a sentence that landed without ornament. Yes. Late 2017. Tesla board seat. The offer was made, in writing, and Altman declined. [1]

Zilis went further. While Musk was still a director of OpenAI, Zilis testified, he attempted to recruit between three and four OpenAI staff to Tesla. She named the recruiting effort, the period — late 2017 into early 2018 — and the channel. The poaching attempt and the board-seat offer are the same gesture in two registers. Both treated OpenAI, which Musk had co-founded as a non-profit eighteen months earlier, as a roster from which Tesla could draft. [2] The paper's Friday wrap framed the five-stake disclosure as the governance vacuum being filled in court; Zilis's sworn account is the conflict-of-interest case landing on top of it.

The defense has spent two weeks trying to keep Zilis's testimony narrow. The Musk team's argument is that the offers were exploratory, never executed, and not material to the breach-of-fiduciary-duty case Brockman has assembled around the OpenAI co-founder period. The plaintiff's argument, which the testimony is built to support, is the opposite: a sitting OpenAI director attempting to offer Altman a Tesla board seat is, on its face, the conflict of interest that the OpenAI bylaws were drafted to prevent.

What the trial added to the public record this week is a stake list. Brockman's counsel disclosed in Tuesday's pre-trial filings that the OpenAI president holds equity in five OpenAI counterparties: OpenAI itself, Stripe, Cerebras, CoreWeave, and Helion. The stakes are not equal — the OpenAI position is the bulk, reportedly around $30 billion at the most recent secondary mark; the Stripe position runs to $471 million; Cerebras at $2.8 million; CoreWeave at $817,000; Helion at $433,000 — but the structural question is the same. Brockman is a personally interested party in the procurement decisions OpenAI makes about every one of those counterparties. [3]

Cerebras prices Wednesday. Brockman's $2.8 million stake will, depending on where the deal prints, be worth between $14 and $19 million by Thursday's open. CoreWeave's stake holds an inferred mark above $4 million on the public float. Helion's pre-IPO position cannot be public-marked, but the company's last private round priced the lab at $5.4 billion. Stripe, which OpenAI uses as its payments infrastructure, is the largest of the four counterparty stakes by face value.

The OpenAI board's posture on the disclosures has been silence. People close to the audit committee describe an internal review of the Brockman holdings opened last week, with no public timeline. The committee chair, Bret Taylor, has not said whether the review will produce a recusal protocol before Cerebras prices. Two days is not, by board-process standards, time to issue a formal recusal note. The trial's procedural reality is that the disclosures are public before the company has decided what to do about them.

The five-stake roll-call lands inside one of the densest weeks of the spring AI calendar. Cerebras prices Wednesday. The Berkshire 13F-HR — the first under Greg Abel as CEO — files Thursday. SpaceX's public S-1 window opens the following Monday, May 18. Lionsgate's Q4 earnings and analyst day land May 21. Each of those filings touches a separate question about what the AI cohort's relationship to public-market disclosure looks like. The Brockman trial is the only one of the five surfaces that puts the cohort's governance — not its pricing — in the dock.

The Zilis testimony also reframed the OpenAI of late 2017. The non-profit then had a board of nine, no commercial revenue, and a mission statement. Musk's fundraising commitment was the single largest line on the resource forecast. Altman ran the board. Brockman ran the engineering. The Tesla board offer, as Zilis described it, was made directly from Musk to Altman, without filing through the OpenAI board. The poach attempts were similarly informal. None of it was, in 2017, illegal. The question the trial is testing is whether it was a fiduciary breach.

Greg Brockman has not been called to the stand. The plaintiff's witness list reserves him for closing week. The defense's pre-trial motions have argued for spousal and work-product privileges that, if upheld, would let Brockman avoid testifying on the holdings. The judge has not ruled on the motions. People close to the courtroom expect a ruling before closing arguments, which the docket places between May 18 and May 22 — the same window in which SpaceX's public S-1 is expected to surface.

What the testimony has done, structurally, is move the AI-cohort governance question from think-piece to evidence. The trial record, when complete, will include a sworn account of how OpenAI's largest non-profit-era backer attempted to recruit its CEO and engineers; a disclosed stake list demonstrating that OpenAI's current president is personally invested in five of its counterparties; and the procurement records that show how OpenAI buys from those counterparties today. None of that is in the S-1 of any public-market AI company. None of it is in the disclosure framework the SEC contemplates. What it is, by Friday's testimony, is in the Northern District of California's evidentiary record.

The Cerebras pricing Wednesday will be priced by buyers reading both records — the order book and the courthouse docket — at the same time.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco