A California jury ruled against Elon Musk on Monday, rejecting his lawsuit accusing Sam Altman and OpenAI of abandoning the company’s founding mission by transforming from a nonprofit organization into a for-profit powerhouse.
The unanimous verdict came after jurors deliberated for less than two hours at federal court in Oakland, bringing an end to a closely watched legal battle that pitted two of the biggest names in artificial intelligence against each other.
According to CNBC, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury’s determination and said there was “substantial evidence to support the jury’s finding.”
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before departing three years later, argued that Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman violated the organization’s original purpose of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.
His lawsuit sought sweeping remedies. Musk wanted Altman and Brockman removed from leadership positions and sought more than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft — money he said would ultimately be directed toward OpenAI’s nonprofit entity.
Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI’s evolution over the years. In 2024, he mocked the company by suggesting it should rename itself “ClosedAI,” arguing it had drifted from its original principles.
“You can’t just convert a non-profit into a for-profit. That is illegal,” Musk wrote on X last year.
But OpenAI’s legal team pushed back aggressively, arguing there was never any promise that the organization would remain a nonprofit indefinitely.
The company also pointed to Musk’s own history with OpenAI. According to reporting from CNN and Fox Business, OpenAI argued Musk previously pursued either a merger between OpenAI and Tesla or the creation of a for-profit structure led by himself before leaving the company’s board in 2018.
OpenAI’s attorneys further argued that Musk delayed filing the lawsuit until after launching his own AI company, xAI, positioning it as a direct competitor to OpenAI. Jurors ultimately sided with that argument.
According to Fox Business, the jury found Musk’s claims had exceeded the statute of limitations, determining he had been aware of many of the issues at the center of the case years before filing suit.
The ruling marks a major victory for Altman and OpenAI, which has grown from a nonprofit startup into the company behind ChatGPT and one of the most valuable AI firms in the world.
The defeat also leaves Musk in an unusual position: while he continues promoting his own AI ambitions through xAI and the Grok platform, he has simultaneously warned that artificial intelligence poses potentially existential risks.
“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,” Musk told Tucker Carlson in 2023. “It has the potential — however small one may regard that probability — for civilization destruction.”
For now, however, Musk’s warning about AI’s future comes alongside a much more immediate reality: he just lost one of the biggest courtroom battles in the AI era.
