Oakland, California - A federal jury ruled Monday that Elon Musk waited too long to sue OpenAI and its co-founders, delivering a decisive victory to the ChatGPT startup and ending one of Silicon Valley's most closely watched courtroom battles.
The swiftly reached decision caps a three-week trial that saw a parade of tech titans take the stand, with Musk arguing that OpenAI's pivot to a profit-driven business betrayed its original nonprofit mandate.
The jury in Oakland federal court found that Musk's claims against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, The OpenAI Foundation, and Microsoft were barred by statutes of limitations, rejecting the billionaire's core arguments.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who had asked the jury to advise her on the matter, accepted and confirmed their decision.
The outcome spared OpenAI from a potentially existential legal threat.
Had Musk prevailed, he was seeking to force the company to revert to its nonprofit structure – a move that would have derailed its planned IPO and unwound ties to major investors, including Microsoft, Amazon, and SoftBank, who have poured billions into the company amid the global AI race.
"The finding of the jury confirms that this lawsuit was a hypocritical attempt to sabotage a competitor and to overcome a long history of very bad predictions about what OpenAI has been and will become," OpenAI attorney William Savitt said outside the courthouse after the decision.
"Musk can bring his claims, and he can tell his stories, but what the nine members of this jury found is that his stories were just that – stories, not facts," he added.
Musk, the world's richest person, had sued OpenAI over its transformation from a scrappy nonprofit into the $850 billion juggernaut behind ChatGPT, claiming Altman and Brockman improperly used a $38 million donation he had intended to sustain OpenAI as a research lab devoted to developing AI for the benefit of humanity.
The jury first had to resolve a threshold issue: whether Musk, who filed suit in 2024 – four years after his last contribution – had done so within the statutory time limit.
It found he had not, ending the case before jurors could weigh the underlying merits.