Unsealed filing details OpenAI's account of the Musk restructuring dispute

Ahead of the April trial in Elon Musk’s lawsuit over OpenAI’s restructuring, a pretrial filing set out OpenAI’s account of the negotiations that preceded the company’s 2019 shift toward a capped-profit structure. It described Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever spending considerable effort trying to accommodate Musk’s demands over how a for-profit OpenAI should be structured and controlled, framing the two co-founders as attempting good-faith compromise rather than, as Musk’s suit alleged, abandoning the organisation’s founding nonprofit commitments.

Among the filing’s claims was that Musk had sought majority equity control of the new entity and had wanted OpenAI to accumulate roughly $80 billion toward funding a self-sustaining human city on Mars — details OpenAI’s lawyers used to argue that Musk’s own preferred structure would have concentrated control and resources in ways at odds with the charitable mission he accused the company of betraying. Sam Altman posted the account publicly on X the same day, restating OpenAI’s framing that Brockman and Sutskever had genuinely tried to find a workable structure given Musk’s requests.

The filing was one of a large volume of depositions, emails and internal communications unsealed as the case moved toward trial, part of the discovery record in a dispute that would go before a jury three months later and ultimately be dismissed on statute-of-limitations grounds without a ruling on whether the alleged breach of trust had occurred.