OpenAI President Greg Brockman read aloud entries from his personal journal during his second day on the witness stand in a federal trial brought by Elon Musk, defending his stake in the company's for-profit arm. Brockman read some of the entries before a jury and a packed courthouse, with proceedings livestreamed on YouTube to a peak audience of about 1,200 viewers.

Musk has alleged that OpenAI abandoned its nonprofit mission to focus on personally enriching leaders including Brockman and Chief Executive Sam Altman. Brockman's stake in the for-profit arm is worth about $30 billion today, though he testified that he received it well before the release of ChatGPT spiked OpenAI's value.

The journal entries cited during the trial were written between 2015 and 2023. OpenAI submitted them as evidence in October, and they were unsealed in January. Brockman estimated the journal contains about 100 pages of entries and said no one was ever supposed to read it except him.

"It's very painful," Brockman told OpenAI lawyer Sarah Eddy. He said he is not ashamed of any of the entries and considers them deeply personal, describing them as a stream of consciousness exploring alternate viewpoints rather than a straightforward log of his actions or feelings. He said he sometimes jotted notes reflecting another person's thoughts to feel them out for himself, and recorded text messages or Signal messages from others to capture and mull their ideas.

In a 2017 entry, Brockman wrote, "we've been thinking that maybe we should just flip to a for-profit. Making the money for us sounds great and all." In another 2017 entry, he wrote, "Financially, what will take me to $1B?" He testified that Musk had delivered an ultimatum that year: either Musk would have full control over a for-profit arm of OpenAI, or OpenAI would remain a nonprofit. Musk voluntarily left the OpenAI board in 2018.

Attorney Steven Molo asked Brockman more than a dozen times to justify his stake, at one point asking whether he would consider giving $29 billion back to the nonprofit arm. Brockman declined and emphasized that he helped grow the best-funded nonprofit in the world. Molo likened Brockman to a "bank robber" who downplays the theft of only $1 million because there is much more money left in the bank, according to Molo's argument to the jury.

Under cross-examination, Brockman read earlier passages of the same entries Molo had flagged. One entry stated, "Can't see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight. It'd be wrong to steal the non-profit from him." Another entry stated, "he's really not an idiot. His story will correctly be that we weren't honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for-profit just without him." Brockman testified that those comments applied only to circumstances that would have followed Musk's removal from the board, which did not occur, and said nearly all of OpenAI's value today has come from efforts that post-date Musk's involvement. Brockman and Altman were briefly ousted as leaders in 2023 over the board's alleged safety concerns.