Musk sued OpenAI over its transformation from a scrappy nonprofit into a $850 billion juggernaut. The jury in Oakland federal court found that the claims were barred by relevant statutes of limitations.
Le Monde with AFP
A federal jury ruled on Monday, May 18, that Elon Musk waited too long to sue OpenAI and its co-founders, delivering a decisive victory to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and ending one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched courtroom battles. The jury in Oakland federal court found that Musk's claims against Altman, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, The OpenAI Foundation and Microsoft were barred by relevant statutes of limitations, rejecting the billionaire's core arguments. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who had asked the jury to advise her on the matter, accepted and confirmed the verdict.
The three-week trial saw a parade of tech titans take the stand, with Musk arguing that OpenAI's pivot to a profit-driven business betrayed its original nonprofit mandate. The outcome spares OpenAI from a potentially existential legal threat.
Had Musk prevailed, he was seeking to force the company to revert to its nonprofit structure, a move that would have derailed its planned IPO and unwound ties to major investors including Microsoft, Amazon and SoftBank, who have poured billions into the company amid the global AI race.
Musk, the world's richest person, had sued OpenAI over its transformation from a scrappy nonprofit into the $850 billion juggernaut behind ChatGPT, claiming Altman and Brockman improperly used a $38 million donation he had intended to sustain OpenAI as a research lab devoted to developing AI for the benefit of humanity.
The jury first had to resolve a threshold issue: whether Musk, who filed suit in 2024, four years after his last contribution, had done so within the statutory time limit. It found he had not, ending the case before jurors could weigh the underlying merits. The judge had ruled ahead of deliberations that the jury's verdict on the statute of limitations would be advisory, but said she would likely follow its recommendation.
Had the case proceeded, jurors, and ultimately the judge, would have determined whether OpenAI's co-founders misappropriated Musk's donations and broke promises to him in order to pursue a commercial path and enrich themselves.
As Judge Gonzalez Rogers noted during the trial, the case had in many ways come down to a simple question: who to believe among the bickering billionaires. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and has since pursued AI projects through his rocket company SpaceX, while his AI startup xAI has struggled to gain traction against OpenAI and Anthropic, another prominent California-based company.
