The second week of a blockbuster trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI kicked off Monday with a series of questions about the finances of the startup’s president, Greg Brockman.

Brockman took the stand Monday, another star witness in a revolving cast of some of the most important leaders in artificial intelligence.
After questioning from Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, Brockman revealed his stake in OpenAI is now worth close to $30 billion and that he holds a stake in multiple companies with which OpenAI has a significant business relationship.Leaning heavily on Brockman’s diary entries, Molo tried to paint Brockman as motivated by money at the expense of OpenAI’s nonprofit mission. He presented one entry where Brockman wrote to himself, while negotiating OpenAI’s future structure with Musk, “Financially, what will take me to $1B?”

“What you really wanted was to be a billionaire, right?” Molo asked Brockman.

Brockman replied: “Solving for the mission has always been my primary motivation. Remains so today.”
Brockman’s testimony focused on how he was compensated for his work at OpenAI, including an arrangement in which he was paid by receiving a stake in OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman’s personal investments. Mr. Musk didn’t know about the deal.

The Wall Street Journal has recently reported on Altman’s personal investments and how he has sought to draw OpenAI into potential deals with companies in which he holds a financial interest.

Two days before the trial, Musk messaged Brockman to gauge his interest in settling the case, according to an OpenAI filing released before the start of testimony Monday. After Brockman suggested that both sides drop their claims, Musk responded with a threat.

“By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be,” Musk said, according to the brief.

Over three days of testimony and cross-examination last week, Musk sought to make his case to nine jurors that he was manipulated by OpenAI and Altman into giving $38 million to a nonprofit, only for the startup to turn it into a for-profit venture.

The Tesla and SpaceX owner is asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their leadership roles at OpenAI, damages of up to $180 billion to be paid out from OpenAI’s for-profit arm to its nonprofit parent, and an unwinding of the company’s recent conversion to a more traditional corporate-governance structure.
OpenAI’s attorney has argued that Musk was aware of the for-profit conversion and even supported it. But when the OpenAI founders refused to give him unilateral control of the venture, it said, Musk launched a competitor and is only now suing OpenAI to slow it down.Other witnesses expected to take the stand include Altman, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella, former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, as well as Shivon Zilis, former OpenAI board member and mother to four of Musk’s’ children.
Brockman, wearing a dark blue suit with a cornflower blue tie, entered the court holding hands with his wife, Anna Brockman. Altman, also in a suit, followed right behind and sat in the front row.During testimony, Musk’s lawyer showed the jury an email that Brockman had written to Marissa Mayer, then the CEO of Yahoo, in 2015, when OpenAI was a fledgling nonprofit lab, soliciting funding for OpenAI, in which he said he planned to donate $100,000 himself.

Brockman confirmed that he never donated that money. When asked by Musk’s lawyer if he thought it was “morally bankrupt” to claim he was going to donate and not do so, Brockman said, “no.”

On the stand, Brockman referred to a now well-known dinner at the Rosewood Hotel in 2015, where many of the co-founders of OpenAI gathered for the first time to discuss the possibility of creating a new AI lab to challenge Google.
Brockman said that the first words he remembered Musk saying to the various attendees of the dinner was, “Is Demis Hassabis evil?” Hassabis was the head of the AI lab DeepMind, which Google had purchased in 2014.Molo attempted to paint Brockman as having deceived Musk multiple times.

At one moment, he showed the jury an email written by Musk fixer Jared Birchall to Musk, flagging that part of Brockman’s compensation at OpenAI was actually coming from the family office of Altman. “Naturally Greg is going to have a greater allegiance toward Sam as a result of this arrangement.”

Musk forwarded the note to Brockman with a double question mark, suggesting he was unaware of the arrangement. Brockman replied to Musk, explaining that his original offer from OpenAI was $175,000 in salary, 50 basis points of stock in Y Combinator, and 50 basis points of stock in YC’s Continuity Fund. But because they ran out of YC stock, Brockman wrote “Sam gave me a 1% grant in his family office instead. There’s no personal loyalty to Sam here.”
“I’m not that motivated by money, but I am motivated by fairness, and it would have felt bad for me to get nothing after the YC stock ran out,” Brockman wrote Musk.On the stand, Brockman confirmed that Musk wasn’t aware of this adjustment of his compensation offer because Musk’s “time was limited’ and it was often hard to get hold of him.

At another point, Molo pointed to company communications showing that Brockman owned a stake in the AI company Cerebras, which OpenAI was in talks with about a potential acquisition. Brockman said on the stand that he told a Musk associate about his potential conflict of interest, but confirmed that he didn’t tell Musk directly.

He confirmed in his testimony that he holds stakes in a number of other companies that have struck deals with OpenAI, including cloud provider CoreWeave, payment processor Stripe and nuclear fusion startup Helion.
Molo made heavy use of Brockman’s electronic diary, holding up entry after entry, trying to argue that Brockman was being two-faced during the period when he was negotiating with Musk about the future structure of the company.During one entry from November 2017 that Molo showed to the jury, Brockman, wrote, “btw another realization from this is that it’d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt. and he’s really not an idiot.” A b-corp is a for-profit company that has a kind of social mission, which the OpenAI co-founders were discussing converting OpenAI into during its early years.

When Molo asked what he meant by this statement, Brockman replied that such a maneuver “would actually serve the mission, but it would be hard to look at yourself in the mirror.”

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.