In Brockman’s telling, Altman was around a lot more often than Musk. The gee-whiz energy here is off the charts, including a pre-launch story about the group being stuck in traffic for an hour and a half and not noticing because they were having such a good time.
From Sutskever’s texts to Brockman:
Elon might spend half a day a week with us
I imagined how it will be and I worry that our work environment can become very stressful
And since he’ll be bankrolling it, itll be hard to stop it
When Brockman was leaving Stripe, he told Altman “I’m thinking about doing an AI thing” and Altman said, “I’m also thinking about doing an AI thing” and “then we kept in touch.” They went to a dinner in Menlo Park — Musk arrived an hour late — to talk about AGI, then Brockman caught a ride home with Altman.
Asked what he does as president of OpenAI, that’s how Brockman responded. God I hate hearing millennial slang in the courtroom. Sooo I did a thing… for $30 billion.
“We very much have these AI models that are smart and capable but they’re not fully connected to the world,” Brockman says. “We as society are still figuring out how do we integrate these.” This is lol and also lmao.
When Musk left OpenAI he told Brockman that he was going to start an AGI competitor within Tesla. “The most important thing was that there was going to be a counterweight to Google/Deepmind,” Brockman said. Musk said there was “no hope — zero percent chance” at OpenAI. Musk also told Brockman that the work on AGI at Tesla would be secret because “the shareholders wouldn’t like it.”
Curious to see what they can recover from this testimony.
Look, correcting lawyers on whether they’ve dropped an article and saying things like “all those words are accurate so far” probably plays in a lot of places but this nitpicking doesn’t really cover you in glory in a courtroom. I get it! I am also obnoxious! But this kind of quibbling doesn’t help Brockman recover from the journal entries that make him look unreliable.
Cerebras, Stripe, CoreWeave, and Helion all appear on his financial disclosures. All four have deals with OpenAI. I see where this is going — probably a preview of what to expect with Altman.
It happened. Kind of a nothingburger, as Brockman said that the deal was “not really my focus area.” We are now back in his disclosures. OpenAI did a December 2025 deal with Cerebras, for $10 billion of chips — and Brockman had an investment. The deal increased Cerebras’ valuation to $23 billion. “Your equity in Cerebras became more valuable because of the transaction OpenAI did?” Brockman admits that’s possible.