OAKLAND, US, May 11,( V7N )— Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is set to testify Monday in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, where he’s expected to address emails showing how Microsoft backed OpenAI’s transition from a nonprofit to a major for-profit AI company.

Nadella’s testimony will come before that of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is likely to take the stand Tuesday or Wednesday. Their appearances mark the final stretch of a high-profile trial in federal court in Oakland, California.

The case has exposed tensions among top Silicon Valley leaders in the years before ChatGPT’s 2022 launch. Musk alleges OpenAI abandoned its founding nonprofit mission and used his $38 million in early donations to build a company now worth over $850 billion.

Musk wants OpenAI to return to nonprofit status, a shift that could affect its competitive position against rivals like Anthropic, Google, and China’s Deepseek. OpenAI argues Musk left on his own after a failed bid to take majority control, and now competes directly through his AI firm, xAI.

An advisory jury is expected to deliver its view on wrongdoing by the week of May 18. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will make the final decision on liability and any remedies, though she’s said she’ll likely follow the jury’s recommendation. A ruling for Musk could put OpenAI’s planned IPO at risk.

On Monday, Musk’s legal team plans to argue that Microsoft’s 2019 investment in OpenAI knowingly helped shift the nonprofit away from its original purpose. They’re pointing to internal Microsoft emails from January 2018, which suggest the company only committed funds once a path to profit became clear.

In those emails, Nadella questioned the value of giving OpenAI a discount on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, writing: “Overall I can’t tell what research they are doing and how if shared with us it could help us get ahead.” He also noted Musk’s claim that OpenAI was “on the verge of some big AGI breakthroughs.”

At the time, Microsoft executives were skeptical. CTO Kevin Scott worried OpenAI might “storm off to Amazon in a huff.” Facing funding issues, OpenAI later created a for-profit arm to draw investment instead of relying on donations.

Microsoft invested $1 billion in 2019 and has since put in $13 billion total. That stake is now estimated at $228 billion — 17 times its original investment.

The trial has already produced notable testimony. Last week, co-founder Greg Brockman, whose OpenAI stake is worth about $30 billion, was questioned over 2017 diary entries that included notes about “making money for us.” Musk’s lawyers used the entries to suggest Brockman was profit-driven.

Brockman also testified that Musk threatened him physically in 2017 after being denied full control of OpenAI.

On Wednesday, Musk announced a new partnership between Anthropic, a key OpenAI competitor, and SpaceX to use compute capacity at SpaceX’s largest data center.

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