The courtroom in Oakland kicked off jury selection Monday in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, where he’s suing Sam Altman and the board over the nonprofit’s shift to a for-profit model. Heavy hitters are lined up to testify: Musk himself, Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Shivon Zilis, the former OpenAI board member and mother to four of Musk’s children. OpenAI’s lawyers plan to argue Zilis passed sensitive inside information back to Musk as the company raced ahead on AI development. Musk claims the move to a capped-profit structure betrayed the non-profit’s original mission and diluted stakeholder control—his main beef is that governance changes left early backers like him out in the cold. Altman counters that the for-profit arm was essential to raise the billions needed for cutting-edge compute power. The trial will probe internal emails and minutes from board meetings to pin down who knew what, when. Behind the courtroom drama lies fierce industry competition. OpenAI faces rivals such as Anthropic, with all players locked in a spending spree on data centers and GPUs. Reuters has reported that OpenAI is teeing up an IPO that could value it near $1 trillion. The stakes in the trial go beyond Musk versus Altman—they’ll shape how control, profit limits and transparency lock together in the fast-moving AI sector.