Elon Musk v. Sam Altman live updates: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to testify as week 3 of trial begins
Publish Date: 2026-05-11 10:09:00
Source Domain: abc7news.com
At the federal courthouse in Oakland Wednesday — the seventh day in the trial of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI — the jury heard the testimony of Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member with a close and complicated relationship with Musk.
Zilis provided testimony about her service as a board member of OpenAI and her role during a critical six-week period when the founders who created OpenAI as a nonprofit corporation considered a variety of alternative structures to raise money.
Musk’s suit contends that Altman and Brockman breached their fiduciary duties to devote the charitable assets of OpenAI, a nonprofit corporation, solely to the nonprofit’s mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.
Zilis is a key witness for both sides because she was involved at OpenAI in a number of different capacities and roles. She was a senior counselor for Musk and had a close personal relationship with him. The two share four children, the oldest two are twins born in 2021. She also served on the board of OpenAI from 2020 to 2023 and voted to approve a 2023 contract with Microsoft in which Microsoft invested $10 billion and also obtained greater rights to some of OpenAI’s intellectual property. Musk contends that the contract was a key part of the defendant’s breach of the charitable trust.
Shivon Zilis’ direct testimony
Zilis walked firmly to the stand, dressed all in black. She spoke crisply and directly, answering questions without embellishment, occasionally saying “of course” rather than “yes.”
She testified that after earning an undergraduate degree from Yale, she obtained a series of positions with organizations in the artificial intelligence universe, including an AI incubator and a venture capital firm focusing on the developing AI industry.
She explained her deep interest in artificial intelligence, recounting that at 13 years old she read a book called “The Age of Spiritual Machines” by Ray Kurzweil, the prominent…
