OpenAI is turning to the court of public opinion as it wages a legal battle with Elon Musk.
While Musk and OpenAI prepare to head to a high-stakes jury trial in April, the two are duking it out online over what exactly happened when Musk split ways with the AI startup he helped cofound.
Musk has been using recently unsealed court documents to attack his rival in posts on his social media platform, X. On Friday, OpenAI published a blog titled “The truth Elon left out.”
The blog, which provided commentary alongside excerpts from several court documents, alleges that Musk wanted “full control” of OpenAI, “since he’d been burned by not having it in the past,” and that OpenAI’s leadership was surprised when Musk suggested having his kids control AGI or artificial general intelligence during conversations about succession planning.
The statements are aimed at the heart of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI.
Musk is suing OpenAI’s key leaders, including CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, over allegations that the AI company misled him by shifting away from its core mission to remain a nonprofit. Musk said he donated $38 million to OpenAI when it was a nonprofit.
The startup, since its 2015 founding, operated as a nonprofit-controlled organization with a for-profit operating arm. It completed its transition to a for-profit public benefit corporation in October 2025.
Representatives for Musk and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Last Tuesday, more than 100 documents related to the suit were unsealed, including diary entries from Brockman, which were obtained during the discovery process.
In one of the entries that was highlighted, Brockman appeared to write about his misgivings about pushing Musk out of OpenAI and committing to a nonprofit-only entity.
“Cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit,” the entry from the court documents said. “Don’t want to say that we’re committed. If three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.”
It was Brockman’s diary entries that US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers cited in a recent ruling, in which she determined Musk had enough evidence that he’d been misled to take the case to trial.
