Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, told a federal court that his ownership stake in the company is worth approximately $7 billion. The testimony, delivered on May 11 during a hearing tied to Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, puts a concrete dollar figure on what insiders stand to gain from the organization’s transformation into a profit-driven enterprise.
What happened in court
Sutskever’s testimony came as part of Musk’s ongoing federal lawsuit, which alleges that OpenAI and Altman have abandoned the organization’s original nonprofit mission in favor of profit-driven goals. The lawsuit frames OpenAI’s evolution as a betrayal of its founding principles, with billion-dollar payouts for its founders as evidence of the shift.
During the hearing, Sutskever also referenced a 2018 email in which he described Musk as “the strongest founder/CEO in the world.”
Sutskever departed OpenAI in May 2024, following a dramatic period that included his involvement in the brief ousting of Sam Altman as CEO in late 2023. He went on to found Safe Superintelligence Inc., a startup focused on building AI systems with safety as the primary objective.
OpenAI’s valuation and the nonprofit question
OpenAI’s estimated valuation now exceeds $100 billion. The original OpenAI was structured as a nonprofit research lab, but the compute costs of training frontier AI models made that structure financially untenable, and OpenAI introduced a “capped profit” subsidiary in 2019 to attract investment.
Musk’s lawsuit essentially argues that the cap was a fig leaf, and that the real trajectory was always toward maximizing returns for insiders. Sutskever’s $7 billion stake doesn’t exactly undermine that argument.
What this means for crypto and AI-linked assets
The intersection of AI and crypto has been one of the loudest narratives in digital asset markets over the past two years. Sam Altman co-founded Worldcoin, now rebranded as World, which ties biometric identity verification to a blockchain-based token. Any governance instability at OpenAI inevitably raises questions about Altman’s bandwidth and the strategic direction of projects he’s attached to.
For investors watching this space, the key variable isn’t Sutskever’s net worth. It’s the trajectory of Musk’s lawsuit and whether it forces structural changes at OpenAI, particularly around its profit distribution mechanisms.