Elon Musk did not wait.

The jury was seated yesterday. Opening arguments began Tuesday morning at the federal courthouse in Oakland. By early afternoon Musk was on the witness stand, sworn in, microphone live, framing the case in 11 words: "It is not OK to steal a charity."

That is the trial in a sentence.

Musk's attorney Steven Molo opened by quoting OpenAI's original 2015 mission statement, the one that promised the lab's research would benefit "humanity as a whole" and not be "constrained by a need to generate financial return." Then he turned to the jury and said the second line of his case: "Scam Altman and Greg Stockman stole a charity. Full stop." The line is identical to the post Musk himself wrote on X on Monday before walking into court. The plaintiff has zero interest in pretending this is anything other than personal.

OpenAI's lead attorney, William Savitt of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, did not flinch.

"Musk never cared about whether OpenAI was a non-profit," Savitt told the jury, per The Guardian's transcript of the opening. "What he cared about was Elon Musk being on top. Since he couldn't control OpenAI, he left it. He left it for dead."

The Background

Two claims survived to trial after Musk dropped his fraud allegations on Friday: unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust. Musk wants $134 billion in what his lawyers call wrongful gains, the removal of Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, and a court order unwinding the for-profit conversion that turned the original nonprofit research lab into the most-funded private company in history. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is presiding. The jury is advisory: it will recommend, the judge decides remedies.

OpenAI is currently raising at an $850 billion implied valuation. The Foundation, the nonprofit parent, owns roughly 26% of the for-profit. If the jury says yes and the judge orders an unwind, that is not a fine. That is OpenAI's IPO killed in its crib and an entire category, the nonprofit-to-for-profit AI lab, immediately illegal under California law. Anthropic's IPO, currently penciled in for October, would be reading the verdict the same week.

The Diary

The piece of evidence Musk's lawyers built their case around is one paragraph long. It is a December 2017 diary entry from Brockman, written while OpenAI's early leadership was debating how to reduce Musk's influence over the lab. The unsealed entry reads: "This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon."

Brockman is on the witness list. So is Altman. So are Satya Nadella, Mira Murati, Ilya Sutskever, and Shivon Zilis. Musk's testimony began Tuesday afternoon after a 20-minute recess. Per CNBC's live courtroom reporting, his first answer about the case was: "It is not OK to steal a charity." Then he added the line that is going to be on every business page tomorrow: if Altman and OpenAI win, the verdict would "give license to looting every charity in America."

OpenAI's defense exhibits go in the other direction. Their case is that Musk did try to fold OpenAI into Tesla in late 2017, that he asked for a controlling stake, that Altman and Brockman refused, and that Musk left in 2018 after his bid for control was rejected. Then they will play the February 2023 text message Musk sent Altman, the one where Musk wrote: "You're my hero and that's what it feels like when you attack OpenAI." That message was sent four months before Musk filed his first version of this lawsuit.

What Actually Matters Here

Forget the personalities for a second. Two things make this trial structural.

One. The charitable trust claim. If a jury finds that Altman and Brockman breached their fiduciary duty to a 501(c)(3) by converting the nonprofit's intellectual property into a for-profit empire, that is a precedent. Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI staff. xAI was founded by Musk. Inflection, Adept, Character, Mistral, every lab with a public benefit charter has the same structural risk. The verdict in Oakland is going to read like a how-to manual for the next 50 of these lawsuits.

Two. The Microsoft deal. OpenAI announced an amended Microsoft contract on Monday morning, hours before the jury was seated. The amendment killed the AGI clause, ended exclusivity, and let OpenAI host its models on AWS. The whole point of that restructure was to clear the path to IPO. The trial is the boulder still in the road. Microsoft and Amazon and SoftBank and Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla and every investor in the company are watching the same courtroom this week, calculating what their cap table is worth if the unwind order comes down.

Kalshi has Musk winning at 45% as of Tuesday morning. Polymarket is in the same neighborhood. That number is the most important number in tech this week and nobody is putting it on the homepage of a financial paper because they cannot decide whether to call it a 45% chance of a verdict or a 45% chance of an industry rewrite.

It is both.

The trial is scheduled for three weeks. Liability phase runs through May 18. Remedies phase, if needed, begins immediately after. Musk and Altman will both testify. Brockman is the cross-examination everyone is waiting for, because he is the man who wrote the diary.

This is the most consequential courtroom in tech since United States v. Microsoft in 1998. And the man who said the loudest thing yesterday will say it again under oath this afternoon.

It is not OK to steal a charity.

Sources: New York Times live updates (April 28), CNBC courtroom feed (April 28), The Guardian (April 28), Reuters (April 28), NBC Bay Area (April 28), Business Insider (April 28), Mashable, Implicator.ai, Times of India. OpenAI corporate blog (Microsoft deal, April 27).