Greg Brockman's Private Journal Is the Star Witness in Elon Musk's OpenAI Trial

Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and co-founder, has been keeping a personal journal since 2010 — and that journal is now Exhibit 161 in Elon Musk's lawsuit against him and Sam Altman. Over two days on the stand, Brockman watched as entries from a deeply private document were read aloud in a courthouse and broadcast to a global audience, covering his innermost thoughts during a pivotal 2017 period when OpenAI was wrestling with its identity, its money, and its relationship with Musk.

The lawsuit centers on Musk's accusation that Brockman and Altman convinced him to fund OpenAI as a nonprofit, then 'stole the charity' by converting it into a for-profit company. He's seeking billions in damages, the removal of both men from leadership, and potentially the unwinding of OpenAI's entire corporate conversion. Prediction markets currently favor OpenAI, which argues Musk supported the for-profit plan, left only after being denied control, and sued for competitive reasons given his own rival AI lab.

Nobody knew the journal existed until January, when Musk's lawyers revealed they had obtained hundreds of pages and had already grilled Brockman about specific passages in deposition. The judge cited those excerpts in her ruling that cleared the way for trial. OpenAI has argued the snippets were cherry-picked and stripped of context. The entries themselves — from August, September, and November 2017 — show Brockman wrestling with money versus mission, processing the Musk situation in stream-of-consciousness style he described as 'chain of thought,' and capturing raw emotion before and after a pivotal meeting with Musk.

Brockman told the court he wrote 'for myself,' and called it 'very painful' to have the world reading his private thoughts — but added, 'there's nothing in there that I'm ashamed of.' The tech world was baffled by the journal's existence. On the 'All-In' podcast, David Friedberg said, 'I don't know anyone that has a diary. I've never heard of this.' But the practice has precedent: Intel legend Andy Grove kept journals from the month his company was founded in 1968, using marble composition notebooks to sharpen his thinking. FTX prosecutors similarly obtained a journal from Sam Bankman-Fried's top lieutenant, plus a self-written list of 'random probably bad ideas' he labeled CONFIDENTIAL.

Brockman stopped writing about OpenAI in his journal in 2023 — the same year ChatGPT became a global phenomenon. The article's kicker is hard to miss: these days, there's a new way to keep a diary. He can just type into ChatGPT.