The entries cited during the trial were written between 2015, when OpenAI was founded, and 2023, when Brockman and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman briefly fired as leaders over the OpenAI board’s alleged security concerns.
Musk hopes the diary entries portray Brockman as a money-hungry executive who initially cared little about OpenAI’s mission.
To overcome that characterization of his thinking in the early days of OpenAI, Brockman has the difficult task of convincing the court that they are instead showing the opposite: showing the careful reflections of the person who is perhaps most committed to OpenAI’s mission.
Brockman compared to a “bank robber”
Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, spent the first day of Brockman’s testimony isolating passages and demanding that Brockman answer for the apparent greed his diary entries revealed.
For example, Brockman wrote a diary in 2017, around the same time he testified that Musk had given an ultimatum: either Musk would have full control over a for-profit arm of OpenAI, or OpenAI would remain a nonprofit.
In that entry, Brockman seems greedy, writing that “we’ve been thinking maybe we should just turn to a for-profit organization. Making money for ourselves sounds great and all.”
And Brockman, of course, made a lot of money after OpenAI created a for-profit arm in 2018, whose stake today is worth around $30 billion. More than a dozen times, NBC News reportedMolo asked Brockman to justify his involvement, while repeatedly pointing to the diary entry in which the OpenAI president also said that $1 billion was all he wanted for his career goal.
“Financially, what will get me to a billion dollars?” Brockman wrote in 2017, as he pondered whether Musk was the “glorious leader” he wanted to lead OpenAI or whether he should back Altman.
In one contentious point, Molo asked if Brockman would consider returning $29 billion to the nonprofit. But Brockman said no, noting that he received the stake long before the launch of ChatGPT boosted OpenAI’s value. He also emphasized that he helped grow the best-funded nonprofit in the world. According to the informationMolo then compared Brockman to a “bank robber” who downplays the theft of just one million dollars because there is so much more money left in the bank.
