Elon Musk’s Multi-Billion Dollar Lawsuit Against OpenAI Dismissed
In a significant twist to a high-profile legal battle, a federal jury in California ruled against Elon Musk on Monday, rejecting his billion-dollar lawsuit against OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, and tech giant Microsoft.
After a three-week trial that captured attention in Silicon Valley, the nine-person jury deliberated for less than two hours.
They determined that Musk’s claims had been filed too late, meaning he ultimately lost the case due to the expiration of the statute of limitations rather than a direct decision on the merits of the allegations.
Musk filed this lawsuit in 2024, claiming that Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman had betrayed the foundational principles of the AI organization.
The billionaire tech entrepreneur, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and contributed approximately $38 million to its initial funding, accused the company’s leadership of transforming a charitable initiative into a profit-driven enterprise without his consent.
He sought extensive remedies, including $150 billion in damages for charitable initiatives, removal of Altman and Brockman from their roles, and dismantling OpenAI’s profit-making structure.
However, the defense countered Musk’s claims by emphasizing the timeline. OpenAI’s legal team successfully argued that the organization had publicly announced its capped-profit model in March 2019, shortly after securing a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.
California law states that claims of breach of charitable trust must be filed within three years of the plaintiff becoming aware of the breach. The jury concluded that Musk had been aware of the company’s restructurings well before the August 2021 deadline.
Evidence presented during the trial revealed that Musk had even considered the idea of a for-profit structure as early as 2017 before departing from the board in 2018. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury’s findings, dismissing the case immediately and noting that considerable evidence supported their verdict.
The ruling clears some legal uncertainty surrounding OpenAI, which was recently valued at $852 billion during a February 2026 funding round. It also secures the financial position of Microsoft’s $13 billion investment, which analysts suggest has grown to over $228 billion.
Neither Musk nor Altman was in the courtroom when the verdict was announced. Musk, who had been in China with a presidential delegation during the trial’s final days, criticized the ruling on his social media platform, X, describing it as a “terrible precedent” and restating his view that OpenAI’s leadership had enriched themselves at the expense of charitable values.
“This illustrates why the ruling by the activist Oakland judge, who merely used the jury as a façade, creates such a terrible precedent,” Musk remarked in a now-deleted tweet. “This creates a free license to exploit charities if you can keep it under wraps for a few years!”
Regarding the case, Musk asserted that the judge and jury never addressed the substance of his claims, only focusing on a technicality related to timing. He expressed intention to appeal to the Ninth Circuit, emphasizing that establishing a precedent for exploiting charities would be detrimental to charitable contributions in the U.S.
While OpenAI’s legal team expressed satisfaction with the outcome, Musk’s lawyers have confirmed their intention to appeal the ruling, prolonging the conflict between the former collaborators in the appellate courts.
