A federal advisory jury in Oakland, California, on Monday concluded that Elon Musk waited too long to sue OpenAI and Chief Executive Sam Altman over claims they betrayed an agreement to run their artificial-intelligence venture as a charitable nonprofit, ending a three-week trial that had shadowed OpenAI's march toward the public markets.
The panel deliberated less than two hours before finding that Musk's breach-of-charitable-trust claims fell outside a three-year statute of limitations, CNBC reported. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately adopted the verdict and dismissed the case against OpenAI, Altman and co-defendant Microsoft, removing one of the most public legal threats over an OpenAI initial public offering that bankers have begun to size in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
What the jury decided
The court did not rule on whether OpenAI's 2025 restructuring violated its founding charitable mission, the question Musk had pressed since filing the suit in 2024. Jurors were instead asked when Musk knew enough about the for-profit pivot to start the legal clock, and they sided with OpenAI's timeline. Gonzalez Rogers told the courtroom that a substantial amount of evidence supported the finding and signaled she was prepared to dismiss any appeal "on the spot," according to CNBC.
Musk's legal team, led by Marc Toberoff and Steven Molo, said it would appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. On X, Musk called the verdict a "calendar technicality" and wrote that Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman "did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity." He separately called the ruling a "terrible precedent," PBS NewsHour reported.
What Musk wanted
Musk had asked the court to force OpenAI and Microsoft to surrender as much as $180 billion in what his complaint called "ill-gotten gains," to remove Altman and Brockman, and to unwind the 2025 restructuring. He testified that he gave roughly $38 million on the understanding the lab would develop AI "for the benefit of humanity."
OpenAI's attorneys countered that Musk's donations carried no restrictions, that the for-profit pivot was the only way to compete against Google DeepMind, and that Musk himself had proposed a for-profit structure on the condition he retain control, at one point pushing to fold OpenAI into Tesla before founding rival xAI in 2023.
On the docket next
OpenAI in late March raised $122 billion at a valuation above $850 billion, CNBC reported. SpaceX, valued at $1.25 trillion after its February merger with xAI, filed confidentially for an IPO in April and could make its prospectus public this week. Monday's verdict removes a contingent liability from OpenAI's books at the moment underwriters are pricing both deals.
What today's reporting didn't reach
Both body-tier accounts are center wires; no left- or right-leaning outlet pushed back on the verdict in today's reporting. Gerrit De Vynck, the Washington Post reporter who covered the trial, told PBS NewsHour the proceedings still produced a "pretty damaging and sort of embarrassing season" for OpenAI, with former board members and executives reiterating claims that Altman is manipulative and has shown a pattern of lying.
Musk's appellate filing window opens immediately, and SpaceX's IPO prospectus could go public within days, putting the same two tech magnates back in front of investors before any appellate court has read the briefs.