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 due to alleged security concerns from the OpenAI board.
Musk hopes the diary entries portray Brockman as a money-hungry executive who initially cared little for OpenAI’s mission.
To dispel that characteristic of his mindset in the early days of OpenAI, Brockman has the challenging task of convincing the court that, instead, he shows the opposite: demonstrating the careful thinking of the person who is perhaps most committed to OpenAI’s mission.
Brockman was compared to a “bank robber”.
Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molloy, spent the first day of testimony at Brockman’s parting words, demanding that Brockman answer for the apparent greed revealed by his journal entries.
For example, Brockman drafted a journal in 2017, around the same time he testified, that Musk gave an ultimatum: either Musk would have full control over the for-profit arm of OpenAI, or OpenAI would remain a nonprofit.
In that entry, Brockman appears to be greedy, writing that “We’re thinking that maybe we should just keep going for profit. It feels too good to make money for us.”
And Brockman, of course, made a lot of money after OpenAI created a profitable arm in 2018, with his stake today worth about $30 billion. NBC News reported that more than a dozen times, Mollo asked Brockman to justify his stake, while repeatedly pointing to a journal entry in which the OpenAI president also said he wanted $1 billion for his career goal.
“Financially, what will get me to $1B?” Brockman wrote in 2017, considering whether Musk was a “brilliant leader”, whether he wanted to run OpenAI or whether he should support Altman.
At one controversial point, Molloy asked if Brockman would consider giving $29 billion back to the nonprofit arm. But Brockman said no, pointing out that he had acquired the stake long before OpenAI’s value spiked with the release of ChatGPT. He also emphasized that he helped develop the most funded nonprofit in the world. According to The Information, Molloy compared Brockman to a “bank robber” who only downplays the $1 million theft because there is so much more money left in the bank.
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