Elon Musk Loses OpenAI Lawsuit After Jury Says He Sued ‘Too Late’

Elon Musk’s grand crusade against OpenAI didn’t end with a bang.

A federal jury in Oakland, California, rejected Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft on Monday, finding that the billionaire waited too long to bring his claims. The unanimous verdict, reached after less than two hours of deliberation, gives OpenAI a major legal win while avoiding a full ruling on whether the company abandoned its founding mission.

The jury determined that Musk simply waited too long to file his claims, meaning Altman, co-founder Greg Brockman, and OpenAI are not liable. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted and adopted the jury’s findings, noting that she was “prepared to dismiss on the spot” due to the substantial amount of evidence supporting the timeline, according to Reuters.

The strict time limits required a three-year deadline for claims regarding a breach of charitable trust, and a two-year limit for unlawful enrichment. Because OpenAI’s for-profit discussions started as early as 2017, and its for-profit arm was created in 2019, the jury ruled that Musk’s 2024 filing missed the window.

On the same statute of limitations grounds, the jury rejected Musk’s claims against Microsoft for aiding and abetting the alleged breach of duty.

Why Musk said OpenAI betrayed its mission

The trial exposed years of private correspondence, text messages, and internal diaries, revealing a fierce power struggle over the future of artificial intelligence.

Musk, who helped co-found OpenAI in 2015 and contributed $38 million in its early years, accused Altman and Brockman of manipulating him and abandoning the company’s altruistic mission to benefit humanity. Taking the witness stand, Musk lamented his early financial support.

“I was a fool,” Musk told the court earlier this month. “I gave them free funding to create a startup.”

Musk argued that the defendants’ shift toward a commercial structure backed by tens of billions of dollars from Microsoft amounted to “stealing a charity.” He explained his delay in suing by stating he believed Altman’s past reassurances, but finally grew fed up in 2023 when Microsoft traded a $10 billion investment for intellectual property rights and future profits.

“Thinking that someone might steal your car is not the same as someone stealing it,” Musk testified. “I would have filed a lawsuit sooner if I thought they had stolen the charity sooner.”

OpenAI’s legal team argued that Musk backed the for-profit transition but turned hostile after he was denied personal control. Altman testified about a conversation regarding what would happen to that control over time.

“A particularly hair-raising moment was when my co-founders asked, ‘If you have control, what happens when you die?’ He said something like, ‘maybe it should pass to my children.’”

OpenAI’s defense team argued that Musk’s legal action was less about philanthropy and more about hurting a rival to his own AI startup, xAI, which he founded in March 2023.

“He waited too long to sue,” OpenAI lawyer Bill Savitt argued during his opening statement. “It’s too late now to gin up something to harm a competitor,” NBC News reported.

Musk plans to appeal

Following the verdict, lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft celebrated in the courtroom. None of the tech billionaires involved were present to hear the decision.

Outside the courthouse, OpenAI spokesman Sam Singer called the verdict a “tremendous victory” and stated, per BBC, that the lawsuit “was nothing but an effort by Mr. Musk to slow down a competitor.” Savitt also spoke to reporters, calling the lawsuit a “hypocritical attempt to sabotage a competitor.”

Microsoft also expressed satisfaction with the resolution: “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,” said a Microsoft spokesperson, according to NBC News.

The legal battle, however, is not over. Musk’s legal team expressed its intention to appeal the ruling.

Steven Molo, a lawyer for Musk, told reporters the verdict was a narrow decision based on “technical legal issues” rather than the core merits of the case. Musk’s appeal will focus on the “continuing violation doctrine,” an argument that a pattern of ongoing wrongful conduct should extend the statute of limitations.

Also read: Elon Musk’s xAI just launched Grok Build, a new coding agent that pushes the company deeper into the AI developer tools race.