Elon Musk Vs OpenAI: Under Two Hours, Jury Dismisses Lawsuit And Slams Major Delay In Filings

Elon Musk’s longstanding lawsuit against the top executives of OpenAI was dismissed by the federal court on May 18. The billionaire was one of the co-founders of the company back in 2015 and invested a $38 million in it. He even attempted to get a unilateral foothold on OpenAI, and planned to merge it with Tesla.

But this joint partnership came to a bitter fallout in 2018 when Musk abruptly stopped his funding for the company. He accused OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, of being involved in a moneymaking model behind his back, along with some of their top executives. It was in 2024 that Musk slammed Altman’s company with the lawsuit.

A federal jury consisting of nine members in total, took less than two hours to deliberate on Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI. They remarked that the Tesla owner took a little too long to file it in the first place, resulting in missing crucial statutory deadlines. These included the breach of charitable trust filing by August 5, 2021, and unjust enrichment by August 5, 2022.

Thereafter, OpenAI’s forensic accountant testified before the court that Musk’s $38 million in donations were completely spent by the company before the earliest statute of limitations deadline.

Cumulatively, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers admitted and accepted the advisory jury’s verdict as that of the court itself. Musk’s case ended up being dismissed. In the meantime, defense attorneys for the Tesla owner revealed that they would be appealing the verdict once again.

One of the primary reasons that fueled Elon Musk’s clash with OpenAI was that the latter’s model of operation changed from serving the good of humanity to a more money-making handling of affairs. The Tesla founder accused the AI company of betraying their once-shared vision of keeping it non-profit and strictly focused on developing artificial intelligence.

Musk had once stated, “I deliberately chose the nonprofit path for the public good and could have founded OpenAI as a for-profit but did not.” He thus sought damages to be paid in lieu of the altruistic efforts of the once-charitable company, as well as ousting Sam Altman from OpenAI’s board of directors.

During the first few weeks of the trial, Musk had further accused OpenAI of stealing from charity. In his words, “I think they’re going to try to make this lawsuit ... very complicated, but it’s actually very simple. Which is that it’s not OK to steal a charity.”

In defense of Musk's withdrawal of donations and the lawsuit, Sam Altman and OpenAI had a very different outlook. The $852 billion valued company upheld the view that it was never decided among the stakeholders that it would remain non-profit forever.

Altman argued that Musk was very well aware of this vision, and still purposely filed the lawsuit in order to fix him as the unanimous controller of the company. He further alleged that the case was filed not only to draw curtains on OpenAI’s rapid growth, but also for Musk to fuel resources and profit for his own AI competitor company, xAI.

Addressing the abrupt stop of funding from Musk, Altman had further stated, “I felt like he had abandoned us, not come through on his promises, put the company in a very difficult place, jeopardized the mission, didn’t really care about the things I thought he cared about.”