Greg Brockman Just Revealed What Happened When He Told Elon Musk No

The war between Elon Musk and OpenAI just got deeply personal in an Oakland federal courtroom.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, dropped a bombshell during testimony this week: he genuinely believed Musk was about to physically attack him during a heated 2017 meeting.

The confrontation happened when Brockman rejected Musk’s demands for greater control over the AI company. According to Brockman’s testimony, Musk’s demeanor shifted dramatically the moment he heard “no.” “I actually thought he was going to hit me,” Brockman told the jury, describing the tense moment.

The meeting dissolved almost immediately after. Musk’s response? He announced he’d be cutting off funding to OpenAI, the very company he’d been bankrolling since its 2015 launch.

This explosive testimony is unfolding during week two of a month-long trial where Musk is attempting to block OpenAI’s transformation into a for-profit entity. The broader conflict centers on Musk’s claim that the company betrayed its original non-profit mission. Brockman’s testimony counters that directly: he says Musk knew about the for-profit pivot all along.

Brockman also revealed that Musk had been trying to gain leverage over the company through other means. Text messages from August 2017 showed Musk attempting to “butter up” both Brockman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever. One particularly revealing message asked: “Will a Model 3 make you be willing to accept massively unfavourable terms?” (referencing Tesla’s Model 3.)

The testimony took another bizarre turn when Brockman discussed Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and mother of four of Musk’s children. Brockman said he learned about her twins with Musk only through public reports. When he later confronted her about it, Zilis claimed the arrangement was “entirely platonic with Elon” and conducted via IVF.

Zilis remained on OpenAI’s board for years after Musk’s departure, a decision Brockman justified by saying: “We trusted her to keep the Elon conflict under control.” That trust ended in March 2023 when she resigned as Musk launched xAI, a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The testimony paints a picture of a founder scorned, attempting to maintain control through personal relationships and financial leverage before ultimately walking away to build his own AI empire.