The entries cited during the trial were written between 2015, when OpenAI was founded, and 2023, when Brockman and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were briefly ousted as leaders over the OpenAI board’s alleged safety concerns.
Musk hopes the diary entries paint Brockman as a money-hungry executive who, early on, cared little about OpenAI’s mission.
To overcome that characterization of his mindset in OpenAI’s early days, Brockman has the challenging task of convincing the court that, instead, they show the opposite: displaying the careful musings of the person who is perhaps most committed to OpenAI’s mission.
Brockman likened to “bank robber”
Musk’s attorney, Steven Molo, spent the first day of Brockman’s testimony isolating passages and demanding that Brockman answer for the apparent greed that his journal entries revealed.
For example, Brockman drafted a journal in 2017, around the same time he testified that Musk had delivered an ultimatum: Either Musk would have full control over a for-profit arm of OpenAI, or OpenAI would remain a nonprofit.
In that entry, Brockman appears greedy, writing that “we’ve been thinking that maybe we should just flip to a for-profit. Making the money for us sounds great and all.”
And Brockman, of course, did make a lot of money after OpenAI created a for-profit arm in 2018, with his stake today worth about $30 billion. More than a dozen times, NBC News reported, Molo asked Brockman to justify his stake, while repeatedly pointing to the journal entry in which the OpenAI president also said that $1 billion was all he wanted for his career goal.
“Financially, what will take me to $1B?” Brockman wrote in 2017, while mulling whether Musk was the “glorious leader” he wanted to run OpenAI or if he should back Altman.
At a contentious point, Molo asked whether Brockman would consider giving $29 billion back to the nonprofit arm. But Brockman said no, pointing out that he received the stake well before ChatGPT’s release spiked OpenAI’s value. He also emphasized that he helped grow the best-funded nonprofit in the world. According to The Information, Molo then likened Brockman to a “bank robber” who downplays the theft of only $1 million because there’s much more money left in the bank.