OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman reflects on the long road from nonprofit to for-profit

When OpenAI launched in December 2015, the pitch was simple: build artificial general intelligence safely, make it benefit humanity, and do it all as a nonprofit. A decade later, co-founder Greg Brockman sits on a personal stake worth roughly $30 billion in what is now a Delaware public benefit corporation.

Brockman, who served as OpenAI’s president, has been offering a detailed account of that transition during court proceedings in the ongoing Elon Musk v. OpenAI federal lawsuit. His testimony, combined with personal diary entries from 2018 and 2019, paints a picture of an organization that realized its original structure simply could not survive contact with the economic realities of cutting-edge AI research.

The compute problem that changed everything

Brockman’s diary entries from March 2019 made this explicit. Compute, he wrote, was the vital resource necessary for advancing AI. Not talent, not ideas, not good intentions. Raw processing capacity.

That realization drove the creation of OpenAI LP in 2019, a capped for-profit subsidiary designed to attract the kind of capital that a pure nonprofit never could. Microsoft showed up with a $1 billion investment, and that initial billion eventually ballooned to more than $13 billion in total investment from Microsoft alone.

From capped profit to public benefit corporation

By 2025, OpenAI had transformed its subsidiary into a full Delaware public benefit corporation, severing the control that the original nonprofit parent once held over the for-profit arm.

Brockman’s $30 billion stake and the Musk lawsuit

During testimony on May 4, 2026, Brockman disclosed that his personal stake in OpenAI is worth approximately $30 billion. The diary entries surfaced as part of these proceedings, and they reveal more than just the compute argument. Brockman’s notes from the 2018-2019 period indicate internal conflicts over Musk’s demand for controlling interests in any profit-driven entity that OpenAI might create. There were also concerns about operational transparency during the transition period.

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