OpenAI Century Lawsuit: Musk Loses

Original Editor: Moses, Peach

Original Source: New Wisdom

Just moments ago, the verdict for the Silicon Valley trial of the century is in!

In Musk's $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI, the jury took less than two hours to reject all claims unanimously.

Every single allegation, without exception.

The sole reason that completely dismantled this lawsuit? 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, dozens of top Silicon Valley titans taking the stand in turns, hundreds of pages of private emails, texts, and diaries turned inside out.

Yet, just as everyone was holding their breath, the jury decisively shut 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 bewilderment: Was the entire dramatic three-week trial nothing but a farce?

In response, an embittered Musk posted again—

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

Next step: appeal.

OpenAI Trial of the Century: The Three Men Were Absent

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

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

The judge announced: "The verdict is in."

From deliberation to result: 90 minutes.

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

Brockman testified for five hours.

The mountain of evidence and testimony accumulated over the three-week trial was essentially dismissed by the jury after a quick glance at the timeline.

Adding to the surreal nature, at the moment of the verdict, the three main protagonists of this epic battle – Musk, Altman, and Brockman – were not present in the courtroom.

A $150 billion lawsuit verdict delivered with both plaintiff and defendant absent.

Their legal teams, however, provided ample emotion.

During a short recess after the verdict, lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft were seen hugging and patting each other on the back in the courthouse hallway, celebrating.

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

"Appeal."

Musk, Defeated by Time

The jury's reasoning was actually very straightforward.

California law states that the statute of limitations for breach of charitable trust is "three years," and for unjust enrichment, it's two years.

OpenAI's lawyers proved a crucial fact: Musk knew about OpenAI's for-profit transition as early as 2021.

He himself had texted Altman, writing, "I'm very uneasy seeing OpenAI valued at $20 billion," calling it "crying wine and selling vinegar" (a Chinese idiom for deception, meaning a bait-and-switch).

That was 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 explained in court that he had always trusted Altman's assurances. 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 different from someone actually stealing your car," Musk said on the witness stand.

"If I had known sooner that they were stealing the charity, I would have sued earlier."

But the jury wasn't convinced.

Because of this procedural hurdle of the statute of limitations, the jury never even reached the substantive merits of the case.

This means the three core accusations Musk leveled – "breach of charitable trust," "unjust enrichment," and "Microsoft aiding and abetting" – were never formally discussed.

All those explosive testimonies, astronomical figures, and dramatic fallouts, for legal purposes, simply didn't happen.

The Night of the Mansion Party: OpenAI Turns For-Profit

Although the jury didn't hear the substantive allegations, the three-week trial had already laid bare the most secret internal workings of OpenAI 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 top global players in Dota 2.

Musk immediately sent 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 the South Bay, known in circles as "the haunted house."

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

It was in this living room, amidst the remnants of the party, that the formal discussion to transition OpenAI to a for-profit entity began.

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

Another entry from November 2017 stated: "Converting to a B Corp without him [Musk] is morally bankrupt."

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

Court evidence also unveiled other hidden subplots—

Musk and Mark Zuckerberg texted each other about a potential joint acquisition of OpenAI.

OpenAI had even seriously considered raising funds via cryptocurrency early on. The financing path from crypto to Microsoft's $13 billion investment itself epitomizes an era.

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

A Trillion-Dollar IPO is Looming; There's No Pause Button in the Final Round

After the trial, OpenAI lawyer Savitt told reporters—

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

Microsoft quickly issued a statement: "The facts and timeline of this case have been clear for a long time. We welcome the jury's decision to dismiss these claims based on the statute of limitations."

However, OpenAI's victory was hardly graceful.

What was revealed during the three-week trial—

Brockman's zero-cost cashing out of $30 billion, Altman lying about safety approvals, the Cerebras related-party transactions, Ilya's 52 pages of evidence, Murati's accusations of "chaos and distrust"—these details won't disappear from public memory just because of the "statute of limitations" ruling.

When Altman was asked on the witness stand, "Are you completely trustworthy?", he couldn't even manage a definitive "yes."

But the biggest impact of this verdict is that it clears the most significant legal hurdle for OpenAI on its path to an IPO.

The Ultimate ASI Showdown is Imminent

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

The 2025 for-profit restructuring was not overturned, the partnership with Microsoft exceeding $100 billion was not revoked, and Altman and Brockman were not removed from management. The path towards a trillion-dollar IPO is now clear.

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

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

In terms of computing power, Altman is betting on the traditional path: throwing money at cloud computing.

The scale of computing procurement has ballooned to around $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, the combined entity is valued at $1.25 trillion, and the prospectus could be made public as early as this week.

In terms of models, they are taking a more aggressive path: training seven large models simultaneously, burning through approximately $1 billion per month.

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

But a more intriguing detail is this: in early May this year, Colossus 2 signed a computing 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 strategy has almost no precedent in tech history.

Now, the two men who once co-founded OpenAI are both 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 front in a multi-front war—

The xAI antitrust lawsuit against OpenAI and Apple, the xAI lawsuit against OpenAI for trade secret theft, and OpenAI's countersuit against Musk are all still ongoing.

And the legacy of this trial lies not in the verdict itself.

It was the first time the core governance issues of the AI industry were brought to a federal courtroom, with the world watching.

On the road to ASI, issues of trust and safety won't disappear just because of a single court ruling.

As for Musk, the saga for the next installment, "Appeal," is far from over.

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/