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The full episode, in writing.
On April 27, 2026, jury selection began in an Oakland federal courthouse for Musk v. Altman. The next day Elon Musk took the stand against Sam Altman, the man he had helped install at the head of OpenAI a decade earlier. Musk testified for three straight days. Eighteen days before the trial opened, a 20-year-old man from The Woodlands, Texas, was arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail at the gate of one of Altman's San Francisco homes. Two days after that, shots were fired at the same house from a passing car. Two more arrests followed. Altman was uninjured both times. He is 41 years old.
He was born Samuel Harris Altman in Chicago on April 22, 1985, the eldest of four children of a dermatologist mother and a real-estate-broker father. The family moved to Clayton, Missouri, when he was four. At eight he got his first computer — an Apple Macintosh — and learned to code on it. He attended John Burroughs School, a private institution in Ladue, and came out as gay at seventeen, after some classmates objected to a National Coming Out Day speaker. He left for Stanford to study computer science in 2003 and dropped out two years later without a degree.
In 2005, at nineteen, he co-founded Loopt — a location-sharing mobile app that bought geolocation data from cellular carriers so users could see where their friends were in real time. He raised more than $30 million in venture capital, including an early $5 million from New Enterprise Associates and follow-ons from Sequoia and Y Combinator. Loopt never gained traction. The Loopt board tried twice to remove Altman as CEO; Altman's supporters defended him. The management team asked twice to fire him for what they called "deceptive and chaotic behavior." In March 2012, Green Dot Corporation acquired Loopt for $43.4 million. Altman walked away with about $5 million.
He used most of it to seed Hydrazine Capital with his brother Jack — a $21 million fund whose largest backer was Peter Thiel, his Silicon Valley mentor. He invested 75 percent of Hydrazine in Y Combinator companies. In 2011 he became a part-time YC partner. In February 2014 Paul Graham handed him the YC presidency and Altman set a target of funding 1,000 companies a year. For eight days in November 2014 he was also CEO of Reddit, holding the seat after Yishan Wong resigned and before Steve Huffman returned in 2015; he later became Reddit's third-largest shareholder before its 2024 IPO. By 2020 his relationship with YC had ended. Graham would later state that Altman was removed because of YC partners' mistrust.
OpenAI launched in December 2015 as a nonprofit, co-founded by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, AWS, and Infosys, with pledges of $1 billion. By 2019 only $130 million of those pledges had actually been collected. Musk had pledged $1 billion and put in $45 million before resigning from the board in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with Tesla's autonomous driving work. Altman became OpenAI's CEO in March 2019 and shifted the company to a capped-profit structure. ChatGPT, built on GPT-3.5, launched as a free preview on November 30, 2022 and signed up over a million users in five days. By March 2025, 58 percent of Americans under 30 had used it.
On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board — Helen Toner, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, AI governance advocate Tasha McCauley, and Sutskever — fired Altman. Their statement said he had been "not consistently candid in his communications." Brockman resigned the same day. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offered Altman a job leading a new advanced AI research team. Within forty-eight hours, 505 OpenAI employees signed a letter threatening to quit and join him at Microsoft; the number grew to over 700 of 770 staff. Sutskever publicly recanted. On November 21 — five days after the firing — Altman returned as CEO. D'Angelo stayed on the board, joined by Bret Taylor as chairman and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. Helen Toner later said she had fired him because he withheld information, did not tell the board ChatGPT was launching, and had not disclosed that he personally owned the OpenAI Startup Fund. Two OpenAI executives had reported what they described as psychological abuse from him.
His investment portfolio is enormous. As of June 2024 he held stakes in over 400 companies valued at around $2.8 billion, separate from his OpenAI equity. He chairs the fusion startup Helion Energy. He took the nuclear-fission company Oklo public via SPAC in May 2024 and stepped down as Oklo's chairman in April 2025 to clear the way for OpenAI–Oklo deals. He co-founded Worldcoin — the iris-scanning crypto project — in 2019; it has been investigated, suspended, or banned in Kenya, France, the UK, Bavaria, South Korea, Spain, Portugal, and Hong Kong, and has never operated in the United States. Musk filed suit against OpenAI and Altman in February 2024, alleging they had abandoned the founding nonprofit mission. The Oakland trial that opened that suit twenty-six months later is the one Musk has now testified in for three days running.