OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman testified Wednesday in Elon Musk's lawsuit against the artificial-intelligence company that Musk, asked years earlier about succession at OpenAI, had floated transferring control of the lab to his children in the event of his death.

The account, delivered under oath in federal court, gave the jury its most direct look at the private terms Musk sought when OpenAI was still a struggling nonprofit. It landed on the same day SoftBank disclosed a $46 billion annual gain at its Vision Fund driven almost entirely by its stake in the company Musk is now trying to claw back.

On the stand

Altman testified that when he asked Musk about succession plans for OpenAI, Musk said, "I haven't thought about it a ton, but maybe control should pass to my children," according to a courtroom account by The Verge, which described the response as "hair-raising."

"Mr. Musk felt very strongly that if we were going to form a for-profit he needed to have total control over it initially," Altman said. "He only trusted himself to make non-obvious decisions that were going to turn out to be correct."

The Verge reported that a 2017 email from Altman to Shivon Zilis, a Musk associate and the mother of several of his children, was shown to jurors. "I am worried about control. I don't think any one person should have control of the world's first AGI — in fact the whole reason we started OpenAI was so that wouldn't happen," Altman wrote at the time.

The testimony followed an earlier appearance by OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who told the same jury his stake in the company is worth nearly $30 billion.

The valuation backdrop

The stakes in dollar terms grew larger the same morning. SoftBank Group said its Vision Fund booked a gain of about $46 billion for the year ended March, with about $20 billion of that arriving in the January-to-March quarter alone and nearly all of it tied to OpenAI, CNBC reported.

The Japanese firm has put more than $30 billion into OpenAI out of a committed $60 billion that would give it about 13 percent of the company. A SoftBank-co-led funding round in March valued the lab at $852 billion.

S&P Global Ratings cut its outlook on SoftBank to "negative" from "stable" in March, citing the firm's added exposure to OpenAI. SoftBank has been selling stakes in T-Mobile and Nvidia to fund the bet.

On cross

Musk attorney Steven Molo spent more than 10 minutes walking Altman through a list of former colleagues who have called him a liar, including former OpenAI executives Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati and Helen Toner, and Anthropic founders Daniela and Dario Amodei. Asked by his own lawyer how it felt to be accused of stealing a charity, Altman said OpenAI is "this extremely large charity, and I agree you can't steal it."

Both body-tier reports filed Wednesday came from center-lean outlets. Musk's legal team and xAI had not offered public responses to Altman's specific succession testimony by press time, and no left- or right-leaning courtroom account was available for this story.

Closing arguments are expected in the coming days.