OpenAI: Brockman says 'I thought he was going to hit me' in Oakland trial

In the second week of the high-profile Musk v. OpenAI trial in Oakland, OpenAI president Greg Brockman told jurors he feared Elon Musk might physically attack him during a tense 2017 meeting. Brockman recounted that Musk stormed out after a control dispute, saying “I thought he was going to hit me,” a moment that underscored the personal dimensions of a case rooted in corporate governance.

Brockman detailed that in 2017 Musk sought majority control in the proposed for-profit vehicle — asking for a 62.5% stake and multiple board seats — and that his refusal to accept a smaller founder equity share led to a heated confrontation. Brockman also testified that Musk curtailed promised donations afterward and that the company’s early-year computing costs, which were modest in 2017, have ballooned into the tens of billions by 2026.

The testimony carried immediate market relevance when Brockman disclosed OpenAI’s projection to spend roughly $50 billion on compute this year. Such a scale of expenditure points to sustained demand for high-performance GPUs, data-center capacity and cloud services, benefiting major suppliers and partners in the AI ecosystem and shaping capital allocation across the sector. Investors are already parsing which hardware and cloud providers stand to gain most from the announced compute trajectory.

At its core the lawsuit accuses OpenAI leaders of breaching the nonprofit founding agreement by prioritizing commercial growth; Musk seeks substantial damages and structural remedies. The proceedings have turned on documentary evidence — including journal entries, emails and texts — and could influence OpenAI’s strategic options, potential IPO timing and contractual relationships with partners such as Microsoft and Nvidia. The legal outcome may reverberate across tech M&A and regulatory scrutiny of AI-era governance.

Market analysts say a court ruling is unlikely to produce an immediate systemic shock to major public technology companies, but it raises policy and investor-risk considerations that could affect valuations and deal-making. Continued disclosures at trial will be watched for implications on funding commitments, partnership contracts and the timeline of any public offering; in the near term, chipmakers and cloud providers are likely to remain the primary beneficiaries if compute demand materializes as projected.