# Greg Brockman Gregory Brockman (b. November 29, 1987) is an **American software engineer and entrepreneur**, **co-founder and President of OpenAI** (2015-present), and previously the **Chief Technology Officer of Stripe** (2013-2015). A North Dakota-born Harvard-and-MIT dropout who rose rapidly through the early-2010s Silicon Valley startup scene, Brockman was recruited to Stripe by Patrick and [[John Collison]] as an early engineer and scaled the company's engineering operation before departing in May 2015 to join Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, and others in founding OpenAI. Brockman has served as OpenAI's President throughout the company's history (2015-present) and was one of the principal operational figures in the **November 2023 OpenAI governance crisis** — the five-day period in which Sam Altman was fired by the nonprofit board, Brockman resigned in protest, the two men announced they were joining Microsoft, and a reversal negotiated over the subsequent days produced Altman's reinstatement as CEO with a restructured board. Brockman matters for the KB for three reasons. First, he is **one of the principal co-founders of OpenAI** — the company that, more than any other single entity, has defined the 2015-2025 trajectory of AI development, from its 2015 founding as an AI safety-focused nonprofit through its 2019 conversion to a capped-profit structure, the 2020 GPT-3 release, the November 2022 ChatGPT launch, the 2023 governance crisis, and the ongoing 2024-2025 expansion. Brockman's technical leadership has been substantively important across this trajectory — as the principal operational technical figure complementing Altman's business/fundraising role. Second, his **November 2023 resignation in response to Altman's firing** was the structural event that forced the board's reversal — without Brockman's immediate willingness to leave (and the subsequent wave of OpenAI employee threats to follow), the board's firing of Altman would likely have stuck. The Brockman-Altman partnership and its 2023 demonstration of loyalty is documented in the subsequent reporting on the crisis. Third, his **3-month mid-2024 sabbatical** (August-November 2024) was a piece of the ongoing tensions within OpenAI leadership through the late-2023 and 2024 period — including the May 2024 departure of Jan Leike and the superalignment team, the September 2024 departure of Mira Murati and other senior figures, and the ongoing OpenAI restructuring toward full-profit corporate status that was announced in late 2024. ## Background - Born November 29, 1987, in Thompson, North Dakota; raised in North Dakota - Attended Harvard University (mathematics, 2007-2008; dropped out) - Attended MIT (computer science, 2008-2010; dropped out without completing degree) - Joined Stripe as its fourth employee in 2010 (shortly after Stripe's founding by Patrick and John Collison) - Stripe Chief Technology Officer (2013-2015) - Co-founder and CTO of OpenAI (December 2015 – 2019) - Co-founder and President of OpenAI (2019 – present, with August-November 2024 sabbatical) - Married Anna Brockman (née Wang), with whom he met at Y Combinator, in 2019 - Based in San Francisco ## Stripe (2010-2015) Brockman joined Stripe as its fourth employee (employee #4) in 2010, when he was 22 and the company was essentially a three-person operation led by the Collison brothers. Across his Stripe tenure, he was principal in building the engineering team and technical infrastructure that supported Stripe's rapid growth. His CTO role (2013-2015) was during the period when Stripe scaled from ~50 to ~170 employees and became one of the iconic payments-infrastructure companies of the 2010s Silicon Valley wave. Brockman's departure from Stripe in May 2015 was publicly described as amicable; he has subsequently credited the Stripe experience with developing his operational approach and his understanding of how to build engineering organizations at scale. ## OpenAI Founding (December 2015) Brockman was one of the core co-founders when OpenAI was launched on December 11, 2015. The founding team included: - **Sam Altman**: Former Y Combinator president; became CEO (formally from 2019) - **Elon Musk**: Early funder ($1 billion pledged across founding-era commitments); co-chair with Altman - **Greg Brockman**: CTO (initially); became President in 2019 - **Ilya Sutskever**: Co-founder and Chief Scientist; formerly of Google Brain - **Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, Andrej Karpathy, and others**: Founding research team The founding thesis was that advanced AI development needed to happen in a transparent and safety-focused nonprofit context rather than exclusively within profit-seeking large technology companies. The original OpenAI charter committed the organization to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefited all of humanity. ## The 2019 Restructuring In 2019, OpenAI restructured from pure nonprofit to a "capped-profit" structure — OpenAI LP, the for-profit subsidiary that could raise outside capital, with its returns to investors capped at 100x their investment and further returns flowing to the nonprofit parent OpenAI Inc. Brockman was principal in the operational execution of the restructuring: - **Microsoft $1 billion investment (July 2019)**: Established the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership that has been central to OpenAI's subsequent trajectory - **Capped-profit structure**: Intended to allow OpenAI to compete for talent and capital with pure-profit AI companies while preserving the nonprofit safety mission - **Board structure**: Retained the nonprofit parent's ultimate governance authority, which became consequential in November 2023 ## The November 2023 Governance Crisis The November 17-22, 2023 OpenAI governance crisis is one of the most documented technology-industry governance events of the 2020s. Brockman's role: ### The Firing (November 17, 2023) OpenAI's nonprofit board — Ilya Sutskever, Adam D'Angelo (CEO of Quora), Helen Toner (Georgetown CSET), and Tasha McCauley — fired Sam Altman on Friday afternoon, November 17, citing his failure to be "consistently candid" with the board. Brockman was informed and immediately removed from the board but was not fired. ### The Brockman Resignation (November 17, 2023) Within hours of Altman's firing, Brockman resigned from OpenAI in protest. The resignation was publicly communicated via Twitter/X and was one of the earliest signals to the wider OpenAI community that senior leadership was not aligned with the board's decision. ### The Microsoft Announcement (November 19-20, 2023) Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman and Brockman would be joining Microsoft to lead a new AI research group. The announcement — which implicitly offered positions to any other OpenAI employees who wanted to follow — produced the subsequent wave of employee threats to leave en masse. ### The Employee Letter (November 20, 2023) More than 700 of OpenAI's ~770 employees signed an open letter threatening to resign and join Altman and Brockman at Microsoft unless the board resigned and reinstated Altman. ### The Reversal (November 21-22, 2023) After negotiations, Altman was reinstated as CEO. The board was restructured (Sutskever, Toner, and McCauley eventually left; new board members including Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo came on). Brockman returned as President. The crisis is one of the defining technology-industry events of 2023 and substantially reshaped OpenAI's governance. Reporting on the crisis (particularly *New York Times* and *Semafor* coverage) has identified Brockman's immediate resignation as the structural event that made the reversal possible — without Brockman leaving, the subsequent employee pressure would have been substantially weaker. ## 2024 Sabbatical and Ongoing Role On August 5, 2024, Brockman announced a "sabbatical" from OpenAI, returning in November 2024. The timing and duration led to significant external speculation about its motivations. Brockman's return to active role in November 2024 coincided with OpenAI's announcement of its restructuring toward a full-profit corporate structure. Through 2025-2026, Brockman has continued in the President role with focus on the technical and product infrastructure side of OpenAI's operations, complementing Altman's external-facing CEO role. ## Musk v. OpenAI Trial (2026) and Brockman's Diary Brockman is a named **co-defendant** in [[Musk v. OpenAI Trial]] — [[Elon Musk]]'s lawsuit alleging that OpenAI's founders violated a charitable trust when they converted the nonprofit into a for-profit entity. The trial began **April 27, 2026** in Oakland federal court before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. ### Brockman's Diary The trial's most explosive evidentiary element. In **January 2026**, Musk's legal team disclosed hundreds of pages from Brockman's **personal diary/journal** — private writings spanning the 2015–2019 founding and restructuring period. Judge Gonzalez Rogers cited the diary in her ruling clearing the case for trial. Key entries introduced at trial: - **November 2017:** Brockman wrote about being "warm to steal the nonprofit from [Musk] to convert to b corp without him" - **2017 wealth entry:** "Financially, what will take me to $1B?" — Brockman testified at trial that his OpenAI stake is now worth approximately **$30 billion** - **"It was a lie" entry:** referenced aspects of OpenAI's nonprofit framing Brockman characterized the journal entries as "deeply personal writings that were never meant to be public" and testified that their use in the lawsuit has been "very painful." ### Brockman's Testimony (May 5, 2026) Brockman took the stand and rebutted Musk's narrative of the founding, recounting work he had secretly done for Tesla during the OpenAI period and contesting Musk's characterization of the founding commitments. Musk had texted Brockman about a potential settlement just **two days before trial began**; the overture did not produce a deal. The diary has become the trial's central documentary record — a candid, contemporaneous account of the tension between nonprofit-mission language and personal-wealth ambitions that tracks the gap between OpenAI's founding commitments and its commercial trajectory. ## Connection to the KB Ecosystem - **[[OpenAI]]**: Co-founder and President; principal technical operational figure since 2015 - **[[Sam Altman]]**: Co-founder partnership; his resignation forced the 2023 board reversal - **[[Elon Musk]]**: OpenAI co-founder (departed 2018); now suing Brockman and Altman; founded competitor [[xAI]] - **[[Ilya Sutskever]]**: Co-founder; principal fellow technical figure through 2024 departure - **[[AI Safety]]**: OpenAI's founding mission; Brockman's operational role in executing (and, critics argue, abandoning) the mission - **[[Musk v. OpenAI Trial]]**: Named co-defendant; diary is key evidence - **November 2023 governance crisis**: Principal figure in the crisis structure - **[[Stripe]]**: 2010–2015 tenure as CTO; pre-OpenAI trajectory ## See Also - [[Sam Altman]] - [[Elon Musk]] - [[Ilya Sutskever]] - [[OpenAI]] - [[xAI]] - [[AI Safety]] - [[Musk v. OpenAI Trial]] - [[Anthropic]]