Muskonomy@muskonomy
NEWS: Trial testimony today shows both Sam Altman and Greg Brockman owned personal stakes in Cerebras while quietly steering OpenAI toward billions of dollars in deals with the same chip company.
Here is how it played out.
Back in 2017, Greg Brockman picked up a private stake in Cerebras. Around the same time, Sam Altman put his own money into the company too. That same month, Brockman started pushing OpenAI to merge with Cerebras. Elon Musk, who was funding OpenAI, was never told about Brockman's ownership.
Years later, the deals exploded in size. In December 2025, OpenAI signed a $10 billion agreement with Cerebras and loaned the chipmaker another $1 billion. Once those commitments became public, Cerebras's valuation jumped from $8 billion to $23 billion in just two months. By April 2026, OpenAI had stretched the deal to over $20 billion through 2029. Days later, Cerebras filed paperwork to go public at a possible $26.6 billion valuation.
On the stand today, Brockman admitted he was on both sides of the table. He acknowledged he was a Cerebras shareholder while OpenAI was negotiating with the company. When pressed, he could not point to a single email, chat or text where he told Elon Musk about his ownership. He also agreed he stood to make personal money if the deal went through, though he claimed it "wasn't something on my mind."
The bigger picture is hard to ignore. Two cofounders running a charity directed that charity to spend over $20 billion on a private company they both secretly owned. The valuation tripled. The IPO is now lined up to turn those private stakes into massive payouts.
In California, this kind of arrangement has a legal name. It is called self-dealing.