Nine-Juror Unanimous Verdict: Musk Loses OpenAI Lawsuit on Statute of Limitations
A nine-person jury in Oakland, California returned a unanimous verdict on May 18, rejecting every claim in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft.
The trial ran three weeks in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s courtroom. The verdict was a procedural one: the jury found Musk was aware of the conduct he complained about as early as 2021 and waited too long to sue. All defendants were found not liable.
What Musk Was Claiming
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit and donated roughly $38 million between 2015 and 2017. He alleged that Altman and Brockman had “stolen a charity” by attaching a commercial entity to OpenAI’s nonprofit shell, accepting Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investment, and running the for-profit business under a structure that made commercial objectives dominant over the original safety mission.
He sought up to $150 billion in disgorgement — not for himself, he said on the stand, but to be returned to OpenAI’s original nonprofit foundation. He also asked the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles and unwind the 2025 recapitalisation that converted OpenAI into a more conventional capped-profit company at a $350 billion valuation.
How the Defence Won
OpenAI’s attorneys argued the commercial structure had been disclosed in term sheets Musk’s advisers reviewed as far back as 2018. Shivon Zilis, mother of three of Musk’s children and a former OpenAI board member, had voted to approve transactions that Musk later objected to. The defence pointed to Musk’s own tweets criticising OpenAI years before he filed in 2024.
The jury focused on the narrowest available ground: statute of limitations. Musk, the jury decided, knew enough by 2021 — before the case became about billions of dollars — to have filed then.
What Comes Next
Judge Gonzalez Rogers is technically not bound by the jury’s recommendation but has indicated she will follow it. A remedies phase was only relevant if the jury found for Musk; it is now moot.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor and production partner, is also cleared. The trial’s most consequential downstream effect is that OpenAI can now pursue its IPO timeline without a live $150 billion disgorgement claim hanging over the offering documents. The verdict also preserves the legality of OpenAI’s 2025 nonprofit-to-capped-profit conversion as a structure — no court has now ruled it a breach of charitable trust.
Musk was not present for closing arguments. He was in Beijing as part of Trump’s state-visit delegation, alongside Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, and Larry Fink.
The judge will formally enter the verdict in the coming days.