> OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife, leaving court

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After testifying in the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, company co-founder and president Greg Brockman would grab his wife’s hand, swap his suit for his black leather jacket and head to work.

He was tackling a new, high-stakes project: merging OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Codex coding tools and API into one super app. Though the work started after court adjourned at 2 p.m., and sometimes required staying up past midnight, it was, he said in an interview, “energizing.”

After a career spent in the shadow of better-known co-founders like Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Brockman, 38, has stepped into the spotlight this year. His new role overseeing product at OpenAI has made him the face of the company’s new strategy on the eve of its IPO.

The world learned from Brockman’s testimony that his OpenAI stake is worth close to $30 billion, making him one of the 100 richest people in the world on paper, and vastly richer than the reported wealth of Altman, who holds no direct equity in the artificial intelligence pioneer.

Brockman and his wife, Anna, have also taken on new political prominence, giving $50 million to two super PACs aligned with President Trump and the AI industry. They have dined with Trump, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi at the White House and celebrated the Kennedy Center honors with actor Sylvester Stallone.

Known as a “10x engineer,” Silicon Valley speak for a coder who is 10 times as productive as the average worker, Brockman had no direct reports for years. Now two of OpenAI’s most important divisions, comprising nearly 1,500 employees, report to him.

He dropped out of Harvard after his freshman year, enrolled at MIT and dropped out in 2010 after a few months to become the fourth employee at a payments-processing firm called /dev/payments, later renamed Stripe.

He said in court that he put $6 on chief executive Patrick Collison’s desk to buy his founder’s shares. They are now worth more than $470 million.

At Stripe, employees would often come to work in the morning and find Brockman asleep at his desk, shoes off and wearing one of his many black American Giant hoodies after coding binges, pizza boxes strewn around him.

Brockman left Stripe in May 2015. He recruited much of the early team for OpenAI, and when it launched later that year, the startup operated out of his living room.

He and his wife also gave $12.5 million each to MAGA Inc., a super PAC aligned with Trump. Brockman said the contribution, which sparked some backlash against the company, was his idea. The contribution came as a surprise to some OpenAI executives, people familiar with the matter said.