Jury rejects Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit, clearing hurdle for possible IPO

A federal jury in Oakland on Monday rejected Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI and its top executives, finding that the billionaire filed his lawsuit too late and ending a closely watched trial that put the ChatGPT maker’s origins, governance and future business plans under a public microscope.

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Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury’s advisory verdict in court, turning it into the court’s final ruling and dismissing Musk’s case after three weeks of testimony and less than two hours of deliberation.

The decision removes a major legal overhang for OpenAI as it moves toward a possible initial public offering that some analysts have said could value the company at as much as $1 trillion.

It also leaves intact OpenAI’s current structure and its push to scale a business that began as a nonprofit research lab before adding a for-profit arm in 2019.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Altman, Musk and others, and Musk left the board in 2018 after a power struggle.

Musk had accused OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman of betraying the company’s founding mission by shifting it toward commercial gain and enriching themselves at the expense of a charity.

He sought roughly $150 billion in damages and the removal of Altman and Brockman.

The jury did not reach the merits of those allegations.

It found instead that Musk waited too long to sue, an issue the judge later said would make any appeal difficult because it turned on factual findings.

Outside the courthouse, Musk repeated his argument that the case exposed misconduct rather than a simple deadline problem.

“Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity. The only question is WHEN they did it!” Musk posted on X. “Creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America.”

OpenAI’s lawyer, Bill Savitt, called the lawsuit an “after-the-fact contrivance that bears no relationship to reality,” and said jurors “kicked it exactly where it belongs, which is to the side.”

Microsoft, which was also named as a defendant because of its deep financial ties to OpenAI, said it welcomed the ruling and remained “committed to our work with OpenAI to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world.”

The trial had also drawn in some of the biggest names in tech, including Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, and surfaced old fissures inside OpenAI, including testimony from former board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, who said they had concerns about Altman’s truthfulness.

For OpenAI, the verdict narrows one of the biggest legal threats surrounding its corporate future at a moment when the company is trying to turn a rapidly growing consumer and enterprise business into a much larger public-market story.

For Elon Musk (the richest man in the world), who launched xAI in 2023 as a rival to OpenAI, the ruling keeps alive a feud that has become as much about control, credibility and AI governance as it is about money.