Greg Brockman has been keeping a journal since 2010, when he was a college student figuring out what to study. Last week, he sat in an Oakland federal courthouse and read it aloud to a jury, while roughly 1,200 strangers watched on a YouTube livestream.The OpenAI president and co-founder spent two days walking the court through pages he had typed only for himself—entries now serving as exhibits in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company he helped build.”It’s very painful,” Brockman told the court. He added that nothing in the journal made him ashamed.The document runs roughly 100 pages. It tracks his decision to drop out of college, his stint as one of the first employees at Stripe, and the co-founding of OpenAI with Musk and Sam Altman in 2015—an outfit that ran for a while out of Brockman’s apartment in the Mission District. He stopped writing about OpenAI in 2023, the year the board briefly ousted him and Altman. He hasn’t explained why.The $1 billion line that became Exhibit 161Musk’s lead attorney, Steven Molo, kept circling one passage from August 21, 2017. “Ok so what do I really want?” Brockman had typed. “This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon…Financially what will take me to $1B?”Brockman’s stake in OpenAI today is worth around $30 billion. Molo asked, more than a dozen times, why he hadn’t donated the extra $29 billion to the nonprofit. Brockman pointed to what he called “blood, sweat, and tears” poured into the company after Musk left in 2018. According to The Information, Molo at one point compared him to a bank robber waving off the theft of a million dollars because there was plenty of cash left in the vault.Then came Exhibit 161, written before a pivotal November 6, 2017 meeting with Musk.”cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit,” Brockman typed. “If three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie…the true answer is that we want him out.”A few lines down: “it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt. and he’s really not an idiot.”Musk’s team called it a smoking gun. OpenAI called it context-free.Brockman answered Molo in clipped, almost robotic sentences. Altman sat in the public gallery behind the OpenAI legal team, staring at the floor. Brockman’s wife Anna sat behind Altman, turning a KN95 mask over in her hand.A defense built on chain-of-thought reasoningWhen OpenAI lawyer Sarah Eddy got her turn, Brockman warmed up. He described his writing style as “chain of thought”—the same term used for how AI models reason through messy problems. He told the court he often typed out other people’s positions to feel them out, which is why his entries can read as self-contradictory. Sometimes he pasted in text messages from others. The result is less a log of what he thought and more a transcript of him thinking.The other entries on display had the same restless, confessional quality. From September 12, 2017: “i’m not happy with the way he’s steamrolling sam, and that he demands to be ceo so that it can be clear that he has all the control…i’m starting to feel more of the fighting spirit, and like the idea of being able to start our own thing.”The “steal the non-profit” line, Brockman said, applied only to a hypothetical scenario where the co-founders voted Musk off the board. They never did. Musk left voluntarily in February 2018.Eddy walked Brockman through the earlier paragraphs of the same entries, trying to show that Musk’s team had pulled the most damaging fragments out of order. The judge had already quoted some of those fragments in her ruling that cleared the case for trial.Even the name of the document became a small fight. OpenAI’s lawyers call it a journal. Musk’s lawyers keep calling it a diary, then catching themselves: “Let me go back to your diary—your journal, excuse me.”A ‘haunted mansion,’ a Tesla painting, and a storm-outThe diary sits inside a much larger pile of evidence—texts, emails, meeting notes, and Brockman’s own testimony about the moment the original OpenAI team fell apart.In August 2017, Musk summoned the group to what he called the “haunted mansion” he had just bought near San Francisco. Amber Heard, his partner at the time, served whiskey amid what Brockman described as the wreckage of a party from the night before. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s head of research, had commissioned a painting of a Tesla to bring as a peace offering. Musk had separately gifted each co-founder a Model 3.That gift, Brockman said, felt like an attempt to butter them up. A text message read out in court backed him up. “Will a model 3 make you be willing to accept massively unfavourable terms?” Sutskever had asked Brockman around the same time.The conversation turned to equity. When Brockman and Sutskever refused Musk’s demand for full control of OpenAI’s for-profit arm, Brockman said, Musk went quiet for several minutes. Then: “I decline.”He stood up, walked around the table, grabbed the Tesla painting and started toward the door. Before leaving, he turned and asked when the others would be quitting OpenAI.”I actually thought he was going to hit me,” Brockman testified.Musk stopped his donations soon after and was off the board by February 2018. He went on to build xAI, whose Grok chatbot now competes directly with ChatGPT. His lawsuit accuses Altman and Brockman of “stealing a charity” he seeded with $38 million in donations. He is seeking $150 billion in damages and a court order unwinding OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit. The OpenAI foundation now holds a stake in the for-profit worth more than $150 billion—the best-resourced nonprofit in the world, by Brockman’s count.The Musk text the jury will never seeTwo days before the trial began, Musk texted Brockman directly. “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America,” he wrote. “If you insist, so it will be.”Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers blocked the message from reaching the jury.The rest of the trial has been less surgical. Former chief technology officer Mira Murati testified that Altman pitted executives against each other and ran what she called a chaotic environment. Tasha McCauley, a former board member who helped briefly fire Altman in 2023, described a “toxic culture” rooted in dishonesty. Helen Toner, another former director, said Murati had gone “remarkably passive” when it mattered most—failing to legitimize the firing that her own evidence had helped produce.Brockman drew some heat of his own. He told the court he has personally invested in several companies that signed big partnerships with OpenAI—Cerebras, CoreWeave, Helion Energy. Altman’s similar pattern of investments has been picked apart in the press for years. Brockman’s, until this week, hadn’t.Altman is still to testify. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is on the list too. Microsoft has been accused in the suit of “aiding and abetting” OpenAI; its early $14 billion investment has grown into a stake worth more than $200 billion.Through all of it, the diary has stayed in the room.Late in his testimony, OpenAI’s lawyer asked Brockman who the audience for his journal had been.”Myself,” he said.It isn’t anymore.



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