The A.I. Billionaire Drama Goes to Court
All the cattiest stuff so far from the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial that began in Oakland today.
On May 25, 2015, Sam Altman sent Elon Musk an email proposing a “Manhattan Project for AI.” The lab they would build together would share its work with the world “via some sort of nonprofit,” Altman wrote. Musk replied that evening. “Probably worth a conversation,” he wrote.
Before the end of the year, they founded OpenAI.
Today, jury selection begins in Oakland — a nine-person jury asked to decide whether Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman get to keep their jobs. What follows is the private record made public: what the people at the top of the AI industry actually wrote to each other, in emails and texts and diary entries they never expected anyone to read. Every item below is sourced from court filings, depositions, and unsealed exhibits in Musk v. Altman et al., N.D. Cal. No. 4:24-cv-04722. And the reason all this stuff matters is that a jury will be asked to sort out not just the gossip — who betrayed whom, whether these were real partnerships or duplicitous back-stabbings — but whether OpenAI, which could IPO later this year, was founded on a lie.
Primary Court Documents
Before anything else, the documents themselves — the ones that made the judge decide this case had to go to a jury:
Musk’s Amended Complaint — Northern District of California, Case No. 4:24-cv-04722. The full allegations, including the fraud and breach of fiduciary duty claims.
Judge Gonzalez Rogers’ January 15, 2026 Summary Judgment Ruling — The 28-page ruling finding “ample evidence” and sending the case to trial. Cites Brockman’s diary directly.
Unsealed Discovery Exhibits, January 2026 — 100+ documents including the Brockman diary entries, the Altman-Musk email chain, and the Zuckerberg-Musk texts.
Greg Brockman’s Diary
Greg Brockman, now president of OpenAI, has a journaling habit. During discovery in 2025, Musk’s attorneys subpoenaed his personal records. Three entries from 2017 — and I’m all for journaling, but careful, people — became the backbone of the judge’s decision to send the case to trial. Here’s some juicy stuff he somehow thought he should write down:
