Sam Altman testified in court that Elon Musk did "huge damage" to OpenAI's culture during his time on the company's board. The testimony came as part of the ongoing lawsuit Musk filed against OpenAI, which centers on his claim that the company abandoned its nonprofit mission by pursuing commercial deals with Microsoft.
According to Altman, Musk directed OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by their accomplishments and then cut staff based on those rankings - "take a chainsaw through a bunch," in Altman's description. Altman confirmed this happened.
The researcher-ranking tactic is a specific kind of organizational damage. When employees at a research lab know they are being scored against their peers, collaboration becomes adversarial. The people best positioned to survive such a ranking are often not the researchers doing the most valuable long-term work but those who are most visible or politically skilled. For an AI lab competing for a small pool of top researchers, that kind of culture carries real cost.
Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018 and later founded xAI, which developed the Grok model. The two are now direct competitors in consumer AI - ChatGPT versus Grok - and increasingly in enterprise and developer markets.
The lawsuit has moved through courts since 2024. What is unusual about this testimony is how specific it is. Altman is not making a general claim that Musk was difficult - he is naming specific management directives and their organizational effects. That specificity matters if the case ever requires OpenAI to establish what its early internal culture actually looked like and who shaped it.