Elon Musk lost his case against OpenAI after a jury reached a unanimous advisory verdict that he had sued too late and that his claims were barred by the applicable statutes of limitations. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately accepted the verdict. Musk said on X that he will appeal, arguing that the judge and jury did not rule on the merits and instead decided the case on what he called a calendar technicality.
The dispute centered on Musk’s role in cofounding OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit intended to develop Artificial Intelligence for the benefit of humanity without pressure to generate financial returns. Musk claimed Sam Altman and Greg Brockman broke a promise to preserve that structure and instead built a for-profit operation. He brought two claims against OpenAI: breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment. He sued OpenAI in 2024 and sought to unwind a 2025 restructuring that converted OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary into a public benefit corporation, while also seeking Altman’s and Brockman’s removal from their roles.
OpenAI’s defense focused on timing. The statute of limitations on the breach of charitable trust claim is three years, while the statute of limitations on the unjust enrichment claim is two years. This means that Musk should have discovered, or had reason to discover, Altman and Brockman’s alleged breach of charitable trust no earlier than 2021 and their alleged unjust enrichment no earlier than 2022. The jury concluded that Musk had reason to believe he was being misled before 2021, which defeated his timeline. They did not decide whether Altman and Brockman had actually misled him.
Testimony at trial traced several moments that OpenAI said should have put Musk on notice. In 2017, Musk and other cofounders discussed creating a for-profit subsidiary to raise enough capital to build artificial general intelligence, and Musk also proposed merging OpenAI with Tesla. In 2019, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary with capped profits, which Musk said still fit the nonprofit mission. In 2020, after Microsoft secured an exclusive license to GPT-3, Musk publicly questioned whether OpenAI remained open, but said Altman reassured him the nonprofit mission remained intact.
Musk testified that he only concluded OpenAI had truly abandoned its mission in 2022, when Microsoft was preparing a major new investment and OpenAI’s valuation rose sharply. He told the jury that this was the moment he believed the for-profit arm had overtaken the nonprofit mission. The jury rejected that timeline. Musk now plans to take the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.