OpenAI Century Lawsuit: Musk Loses

Original Editor: Moses Tao

Original Source: New Intelligence

Just moments ago, the verdict in Silicon Valley's trial of the century arrived!

In the $150 billion lawsuit Musk filed against OpenAI, the jury took less than two hours to unanimously dismiss it.

All charges, none spared.

And the sole reason that shattered this lawsuit is simple: Musk filed too late, the statute of limitations had expired...

This might be the most absurd courtroom scene of 2026.

Before this, it was a high-profile tug-of-war—

A three-week trial, 11 days of testimony, a parade of dozens of Silicon Valley top executives, and hundreds of pages of private emails, text messages, and diaries turned inside out.

Yet, just as everyone held their breath, the jury swiftly and decisively struck it down.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stated in court that she fully agreed with the jury's conclusion.

The verdict sent shockwaves across the internet. Countless netizens expressed confusion: Was the past three weeks of dramatic trial nothing but a farce?

In response, a dissatisfied Musk posted again—

Altman and Greg Brockman's actions were essentially stealing from a charity to line their own pockets.

Next step, appeal.

The OpenAI Trial of the Century: The Three Men Were Absent

On Monday at 8:30 AM, the jury began closed-door deliberations.

At 10:23 AM Pacific Time, court clerk Edwin Cuenco handed a note to the judge.

The judge announced: "The verdict is in."

From deliberation to verdict: 90 minutes.

This speed was astonishingly fast. Musk alone spent three days on the witness stand.

Brockman testified for five hours.

The massive evidence and testimony accumulated over the three-week trial were essentially glanced over by the jury, who made their decision based on the timeline.

Even more surreal, at the moment of the verdict, the three protagonists of this epic battle—Musk, Altman, and Brockman—were nowhere in the courtroom.

A $150 billion lawsuit verdict, with the plaintiff and defendants collectively absent.

Their legal teams, however, were fully emotionally invested.

During the brief recess after the verdict, lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft hugged and patted each other on the back in the courtroom corridor, celebrating.

Musk's lead attorney, Marc Toberoff, walked out of the courthouse doors and, facing a swarm of reporters, uttered only two words:

"Appeal."

Musk: Defeated by Time

The jury's reasoning was actually very straightforward.

California law stipulates a three-year statute of limitations for claims of breach of charitable trust and two years for unjust enrichment.

OpenAI's lawyers proved a key fact: Musk knew as early as 2021 that OpenAI was transitioning to a for-profit entity.

He himself had sent text messages to Altman, writing, "I'm very uncomfortable seeing OpenAI valued at $20 billion" and "This is a wolf in sheep's clothing."

That was in late 2022 to early 2023. But Musk didn't file the lawsuit until February 2024.

The jury determined the statute of limitations had expired; the lawsuit was too late.

Musk's explanation in court was that he had always believed Altman's assurances, and it wasn't until Microsoft's $10 billion investment materialized in 2023 that he realized "the for-profit arm was the tail wagging the dog."

"Thinking someone might steal your car is not the same as someone actually stealing your car," Musk said on the witness stand.

"If I had known they were stealing the charity, I would have sued long ago."

But the jury wasn't convinced.

Because the procedural hurdle of the statute of limitations prevented the jury from ever reaching the substantive issues.

In other words, the three core charges Musk alleged—"breach of charitable trust," "unjust enrichment," and "Microsoft's assistance and abetting"—were never formally discussed.

All those explosive testimonies, shocking numbers, and dramatic confrontations were, in a legal sense, as if they never happened.

That Night at the Mansion Party: OpenAI Turned For-Profit

Although the jury didn't rule on the substantive allegations, the three-week trial had already laid bare OpenAI's most secretive internal operations over the past 11 years.

Some details were unknown even to Silicon Valley's most seasoned gossips.

In the summer of 2017, OpenAI's AI defeated the world's top players in Dota 2.

Musk immediately fired off an email: "It's time to take the next step. This is the trigger event."

He called the core team to his 16,000-square-foot mansion in South Bay, known to insiders as "The Haunted House."

Brockman recalled in his testimony that upon entering, the floor was littered with confetti and plastic cups from a party the night before.

It was in this post-party living room that the formal discussion of transitioning OpenAI to a for-profit entity began.

Musk's lawyer, Steven Molo, projected Brockman's electronic diary onto the giant courtroom screen. One entry from the negotiations that same year read: "What would get me to $1 billion?"

Another from November 2017 read: "To convert to a B Corp without him (Musk) would be morally bankrupt."

Nine years later, he sat through cross-examination sitting on $30 billion in equity.

Court evidence also unveiled other hidden plotlines—

Musk and Zuckerberg had exchanged text messages about a potential joint acquisition of OpenAI;

OpenAI had even seriously considered using cryptocurrency for early-stage funding. From crypto to Microsoft's $13 billion, this financing path itself is a microcosm of an era.

This trial could be a documentary, but the jury moved on in 90 minutes.

A Trillion-Dollar IPO on the Horizon: No Pause Button for the Finale

After the trial, OpenAI lawyer Savitt told reporters—

OpenAI is a non-profit mission-driven organization, it has been in the past, and it will be in the future.

Microsoft also quickly issued a statement: "The facts and timeline of this case have always been clear. We welcome the jury's dismissal of these claims on grounds of untimeliness."

Although OpenAI won, the victory was hardly dignified.

What was exposed during the three-week trial—

Brockman cashing out $30 billion at zero cost, Altman lying about security approvals, the Cerebras related-party transaction, Ilya's 52 pages of evidence, Murati's allegations of "chaos and distrust"—these things won't disappear from public memory just because "the statute of limitations expired."

When asked under cross-examination "Are you completely trustworthy?" Altman couldn't even give a decisive "yes."

But the biggest impact of this verdict is clearing the most significant legal hurdle for OpenAI's IPO.

The Ultimate ASI Showdown is Imminent

In March of this year, OpenAI completed a $122 billion funding round, valuing it at $852 billion.

The 2025 for-profit restructuring wasn't overturned. Microsoft's over $100 billion partnership wasn't revoked. Altman and Brockman weren't removed from management. The path to a trillion-dollar IPO is now clear.

Supporting this astronomical valuation is OpenAI's true trump card:

GPT-5.5, released in April, which can independently complete complex tasks from writing code to data analysis without requiring step-by-step human instructions.

In terms of computing power, Altman is betting on the traditional path, spending heavily on cloud computing.

The scale of computing procurement has ballooned to $600 billion, spanning five cloud providers including Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and AWS.

On Musk's side, SpaceX secretly filed for an IPO in April. After merging with xAI, its valuation has reached $1.25 trillion. The prospectus could be made public as early as this week.

In terms of models, they've taken a more aggressive path: training 7 large models simultaneously, burning through approximately $1 billion per month.

From Grok 4.4 to the entire Grok 5 series, Grok 5's parameter count is several times that of GPT-5.5, all running on Colossus 2.

But a more intriguing detail: In early May, Colossus 2 signed a compute contract with Anthropic, starting to sell computing power externally.

This means Musk isn't just building models; he's becoming the arms dealer of the AI era—

Training his own models with one hand while selling computing power to competitors with the other. This approach has almost no precedent in tech history.

Now, the two men who once co-founded OpenAI are each racing towards their own trillion-dollar IPOs.

But the legal battle isn't truly over.

Musk's lawyers have explicitly reserved the right to appeal, although the judge's stance makes a reversal seem unlikely.

More importantly, this is just one of several fronts—

xAI's antitrust lawsuit against OpenAI and Apple, xAI's trade secret misappropriation lawsuit against OpenAI, and OpenAI's counterclaim against Musk are all still ongoing.

The legacy of this trial isn't the verdict itself.

It brought the core governance issues of the AI industry into a federal courtroom for the first time, and the world was watching.

On the path to ASI, issues of trust and safety won't disappear with a single judicial ruling.

As for Musk, the next chapter of the "appeal" has yet to be written.

References:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-18/elon-musk-loses-case-against-sam-altman-to-force-openai-overhaul 

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/musk-altman-openai-trial-verdict.html 

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/elon-musk-loses-lawsuit-against-openai-2026-05-18/ 

https://www.wired.com/story/musk-v-altman-jury-verdict/ 

https://nypost.com/2026/05/18/business/elon-musk-loses-lawsuit-against-openai-in-unanimous-verdict/