Greg Brockman sat in the witness chair at Oakland's federal courthouse Monday and said the number out loud: his stake in OpenAI is worth nearly $30 billion. He invested zero dollars to get it.

At that valuation, Brockman is among the 100 wealthiest people on the planet. He is not on the Forbes billionaire list because, until Monday, nobody knew the size of his stake. Now a jury does.

This is week two of Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Brockman. The accusation: they stole a charity. Musk, who donated $38 million between 2016 and 2020, claims the co-founders transformed OpenAI from a nonprofit dedicated to humanity's benefit into a for-profit engine that made them obscenely rich. Brockman's testimony Monday made that argument very easy to visualize.

The numbers that matter

Brockman didn't just confirm his OpenAI wealth. He also disclosed a $471 million investment in Stripe (where he previously worked) and a stake in CoreWeave, the cloud computing provider with a major OpenAI contract. He confirmed OpenAI is "exploring" an IPO at its latest fundraising valuation of $852 billion.

Musk's attorney Steven Molo went straight for the jugular. He showed the jury a 2015 email where Brockman pledged to donate $100,000 to help attract other Silicon Valley donors to the then-nonprofit OpenAI. "I did not end up donating, that's true," Brockman conceded, per AFP's courtroom reporting.

The optics are brutal for OpenAI's defense. The company's president promised $100K to a charity, never paid it, and now holds a $30 billion stake in the for-profit version of that same charity. Whatever the legal merits, that is a devastating visual for a jury.

"The most hated men in America"

The day started with a bombshell that didn't make it into the courtroom. OpenAI filed a late Sunday motion revealing that Musk texted Brockman two days before the trial began, "gauging interest" in a settlement. Brockman responded and suggested both sides drop all claims. Musk refused.

"By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America," Musk replied, according to the filing. "If you insist, so it will be."

OpenAI's lawyers argued the message showed Musk's true motive: not protecting a charity, but attacking a competitor. They wanted Brockman to testify about the text. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers denied the request, ruling the issue should have been raised while Musk was still on the stand.

Ars Technica's Ashley Belanger caught the delicious irony: OpenAI's lead attorney William Savitt, who grilled Musk on the stand, was previously on Musk's own legal team during the Twitter acquisition fight. During that case, Musk threatened Twitter executives with "World War III" after a failed settlement attempt. The pattern repeats.

Brockman's defense

Brockman pushed back on the charity theft narrative. "We have created the most well-resourced nonprofit in history, with over $150 billion worth of equity value," he told the court. He argued the for-profit conversion was necessary because AI development simply required more capital than any nonprofit structure could provide, and that the original mission survived the transition.

"This is going to be the most important technological shift in human history," Brockman said. "This is really about humanity as a whole."

Musk's legal team plans to use the rest of the week showing the jury that OpenAI's founders "never really thought this was going to be a nonprofit," per legal analyst Vincent Joralemon of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. Brockman's journal entries, unsealed earlier this year, are expected to feature prominently.

What comes next

Brockman's testimony continues tomorrow. Stuart Russell, a UC Berkeley AI researcher and Musk's only expert witness on AI technology, also testified Monday, warning about AGI arms race dynamics and the tension between safety and speed. The contradictions were visible: Musk signed the same AI pause letter as Russell in 2023 while simultaneously launching xAI.

Altman is not expected until the week of May 11. But Musk doesn't need Altman on the stand to make his visual argument. A nonprofit co-founder who pledged $100K, never paid it, and now holds $30 billion worth of equity? That image will live in the jury's memory for the rest of the trial.