Shivon Zilis, a longtime associate of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a former board member at OpenAI, took the stand on May 6 in a trial accusing the company’s founders of betraying their philanthropic mission to create artificial intelligence (AI) for the good of all humanity.
Musk, who is also the father of Zilis’s four children, sued cofounders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, alleging that they bilked him out of $38 million in donations, then restructured as a for-profit corporation by exclusively licensing their flagship product to Microsoft—betraying a founding mission to operate as an open-source charity that would counter the risks of profit-driven AI.
