Musk v. Altman: Ilya Sutskever testifies that his OpenAI stake is worth ~$7B and he had concerns about Altman for a year before Altman's brief ouster as CEO
OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said his stake in the ChatGPT maker is worth roughly $7 billion …
BloombergRachel Metz
Context & Ripple Effects
The Musk v. Altman proceedings have increasingly put OpenAI’s internal governance and the personal wealth created by its commercial evolution into the record. Earlier testimony put Greg Brockman’s stake near $30 billion, while a later filing highlighted Altman’s holdings in companies that have done business with OpenAI.
The same coverage also underscores the scale behind those stakes: Microsoft’s spending on OpenAI and related infrastructure has exceeded $100 billion, and OpenAI expects sharply higher computing expenditure than in its early years. Sutskever’s account adds a co-founder’s perspective on the governance dispute that briefly removed Altman.
First-order effects
Sutskever’s testimony gives the litigation a firsthand account that concerns about Altman predated the board’s attempted ouster, strengthening scrutiny of how OpenAI’s board handled leadership and oversight.
Putting Sutskever’s roughly $7 billion stake on the record further illustrates how much value OpenAI’s current structure has created for former and current insiders.
Second-order effects
The evidence raises the stakes for arguments over whether OpenAI’s commercial arrangements remain aligned with its nonprofit governance role, alongside prior testimony and filings concerning other insiders’ wealth and interests.
Major partners and infrastructure funders, including Microsoft, gain a clearer reminder that governance instability can become a material issue for an organization requiring exceptionally large continuing compute commitments.
Third-order effects
If the case continues to surface large insider holdings alongside governance disputes, AI labs using nonprofit or mission-led control structures may face sustained pressure to make conflicts, incentives, and board authority more legible.
The broader tension is unresolved: capital-intensive frontier-AI development requires vast commercial funding, while unusual governance structures are expected to preserve constraints on the resulting enterprise.
The trend: This is part of a wider shift in which frontier-AI companies’ governance models are being tested against the enormous private wealth and infrastructure commitments generated by commercialization.
google offered ilya sutskever $6 million a year to stay at google instead of leaving to found openai, which he said was a “staggering amount of money” at the time (and i would agree with that) now sutskever is worth multiple billions on paper due to OAI equity
@techreview Ilya Sutskever and the rest of the OpenAI board briefly fired Sam Altman as CEO in 2023. “This kind of environment, where the executives [don't] exactly have the correct information, makes the environment not conducive to attaining any difficult, grand goal,” such as …
sutskever does not seem like a witness that OpenAI side loves (Musk side is questioning him now) notes that the superalignment team was dissolved and that safety was was “the most important work for the long term” musk counsel wants to establish OAI is not serious about safety
i've been eagle-eyed for openai founder stake details in the musk/altman trial, which have long been a mystery. today we learned that @ilyasut's stake is worth about $7B, up from $5B last november. (last week we learned @gdb's stake is worth about $30B. https://www.bloomberg.com/…
🚨BREAKING: Ilya just confirmed under oath what he saw: Sam lying. And he confirmed that he thought it was appropriate to fire Altman for it. And that he had been concerned for about Sam for a long time. 100% confirming what I had been saying since the week of the firing.
@techreview Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever takes the stand in a light blue shirt, with an intense, unblinking gaze. “We discussed lots of outlandish ideas very often,” he says, recalling his conversations with Elon Musk at OpenAI in its early days.
@techreview Satya Nadella says he never demanded OpenAI to reinstate Sam Altman when he was briefly fired in 2023. The board's explanation that Altman was “not candid” wasn't sufficient, says Nadella, so he sought “clarity from the OpenAI board.” And he was “very worried that the…
@jhenryphoto good nadella burn in an internal email: “I dont want [microsoft] to be IBM and OpenAI to be Microsoft” re: he wanted to make sure that MSFT was actually getting OpenAI's intellectual property and not getting left in the dust
MSFT exec says MSFT has “recognized $9 billion in revenue” throughout the total life of their partnership with openAI. that is a figure that comes from their 20 percent revenue share. and that's after, i think, accounting for their 13b investment and Azure cloud $$$ expenses
Nadella, who was yanked out of a meeting when Altman was fired in 2023: “I was pretty surprised to say the least. b/c there was no reach out to me from the board, which i thought would be a pretty obvious thing to do.” customers started beating down his door, too
really good nadella line re: OpenAI intellectual property: “Right now we are a very think layer on top of nvidia and all the IP is with OpenAI.” “If we are going to spend this kind of money and not have control of destiny, it makes no sense.”
@techreview Asked whether OpenAI's for-profit subsidiary breached its nonprofit mission, Nadella says: “the nonprofit approved the creation of the for-profit entity, so they could continue to pursue the mission.” He adds: “If the pie became larger, the nonprofit would benefit as …
@techreview Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella takes the stand in a black suit and sky blue tie. Since 2019, Microsoft has made investments in OpenAI's for-profit subsidiary and provided supercomputers for AI model training, in return for a license to use OpenAI's technology in developi…
@techreview “I'm very proud of the fact that we took the risk when no one else was willing to sponsor this fledgling lab,” says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, referring to OpenAI, and “start all the innovation that the industry has today.”
@techreview Satya Nadella says when he met Elon Musk in 2015, he knew that Elon was concerned about AI safety and didn't want “AI being cornered by one company.”