Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit tossed after court says he waited too long

Al Jazeera, CNN, the New York Times, CBS News, FOX Business, BBC contributed to this report.

A California jury has thrown out Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, handing the AI company a major win and ending Musk’s bid to force a dramatic shake-up at the top.

The nine-person jury said Musk missed the three-year deadline to bring the case. In plain terms, he filed too late. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury’s advisory verdict on Monday and dismissed the claims.

It was a quick finish to a messy, high-stakes trial that played out over three weeks in Oakland. Musk and Altman both took the stand. So did executives from OpenAI and Microsoft, along with legal experts. The courtroom fight had all the ingredients of a Silicon Valley grudge match: money, power, ego, and a big question about what OpenAI was always meant to be.

Musk had gone after $150 billion in damages and wanted Altman removed from company leadership. That kind of win could have blown up OpenAI’s business plans and complicated its expected public listing later this year. Instead, those risks are off the table for now.

At the center of the case was Musk’s claim that OpenAI, Altman and company president Greg Brockman broke their promise to keep the outfit nonprofit. Musk said he helped fund OpenAI for charitable purposes, only to watch it turn into a profit-driven machine valued at $852 billion.

His argument was blunt.

“It’s not OK to steal a charity,” he told the court.

OpenAI pushed back hard. The company said there was never a promise to stay nonprofit forever, and that Musk was the one who tried to steer the company his way before walking away in 2018 after failing to win control.

Microsoft, which teamed up with OpenAI in 2019, was also named in the suit. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company welcomed the jury’s decision to toss the claims as untimely.

OpenAI’s side argued that the company’s for-profit structure did not betray its mission, but helped fund it. Two law professors testified that they saw no problem with the setup. One of them, Harvard’s John Coates, said the arrangement had created substantial value for the nonprofit arm.

The trial also peeled back the long-simmering split between Musk and Altman, two men who helped launch OpenAI in 2015 and later turned into rivals. Musk left years ago. Now he runs xAI, which is competing directly with OpenAI in the race to build the next generation of artificial intelligence.

OpenAI’s legal team did not hold back either, calling Musk’s suit a late, strategic attack on a competitor rather than some noble rescue mission.

For now, the court agreed. The case is over, and Musk’s big legal swing at OpenAI has come up empty.