Took too long now your case is gone: Elon Musk loses trial against Sam Altman and OpenAI
Overview & Key Takeaways
The jury and judge have decided that Musk's complaint was not timely enough to count.
Elon Musk has lost his case against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for the very boring reason that he took too long to file the complaint.
Musk sued over OpenAI's pivot from nonprofit to for-profit (via a complicated restructuring scheme that has still technically kept a nonprofit in play), claiming that its leaders committed unjust enrichment by straying from the company's founding mission. Musk was a co-founder and donor to OpenAI, but split with the company in 2018—because the board refused to hand him total control, according to OpenAI president Greg Brockman—and sued in 2024.
An advisory jury briefly deliberated on Monday before deciding that the statute of limitations prevented a verdict in Musk's favor. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with the jury and found in favor of Altman and company.
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"Claims of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment are dismissed as untimely," the judge stated, as reported by CNBC.
Microsoft, which has invested heavily in OpenAI, was also targeted by Musk's complaint.
"The facts and the timeline in this case have long been clear, and we welcome the jury's decision to dismiss these claims as untimely," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement provided to PC Gamer.
"I will be filing an appeal with the Ninth Circuit, because creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America," Musk said in a statement posted to X.
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Though the trial didn't amount to much, we did learn some interesting things from this conference of powerful rich people, including that Gabe Newell helped Hideo Kojima get a tour of SpaceX, and that the AI moguls involved have been obsessed with Google AI head and former game developer Demis Hassabis.
