The verdict came after less than two hours of deliberation. A federal jury in Oakland found unanimously that Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI was time-barred: the statute of limitations had passed before he brought his claims, and that was effectively the end of the case. Musk had spent three days on the stand, subpoenaed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and argued that OpenAI's founders had stolen a charity. The jury never got to any of those questions. The case ended on a technicality that both sides had known was coming.
Musk's core argument was that he donated roughly $44 million to OpenAI between 2015 and 2017 on the understanding that it would remain a nonprofit dedicated to safe AI development for humanity's benefit. When OpenAI converted to a for-profit public benefit corporation backed by more than $100 billion from Microsoft, he said the original mission was betrayed. He sought the removal of CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman, an unwinding of the October 2025 recapitalization, and up to $134 billion in disgorgement directed back to the nonprofit foundation.
The problem was timing. Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018. He didn't file suit until 2024. His own lawyers acknowledged the six-year gap required an explanation. The jury's finding that the claims were filed too late was advisory, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said she was "prepared to dismiss on the spot" and would almost certainly follow the recommendation. She had also expressed open skepticism about the $134 billion damages figure throughout the trial, calling it unconvincing at a pretrial hearing in March.
What the trial produced, despite the procedural outcome, was an unusually candid account of OpenAI's early years. The most damaging piece of evidence for OpenAI was never ruled on by the jury: a personal journal entry by Brockman, written in November 2017, that read, "Cannot say we are committed to the non-profit... if three months later we're doing b-corp then it was a lie." Judge Gonzalez Rogers had cited that entry in her January ruling allowing the case to proceed. Ilya Sutskever testified that he had gathered evidence of what he called Altman's pattern of deception before voting to remove him as CEO in late 2023, then later reversed course and said he regretted reinstating Altman. Altman, under cross-examination, acknowledged he had "told the occasional lie." Former board member Shivon Zilis, called by OpenAI, offered no corroboration for Musk's account of founding commitments.
OpenAI's defense was that Musk had wanted control of the company rather than fidelity to its mission, that he had pushed to create a for-profit subsidiary as early as 2017 on condition that he control it, and that when that demand was refused he left the board and eventually founded his own AI company. "He wanted dominion over AGI," OpenAI attorney Sarah Eddy told the jury. Musk's attorney called it a case of OpenAI stealing a charity. The jury found neither claim legally actionable in time.
The governance stakes that hovered over the trial remain unresolved. California Attorney General Rob Bonta extracted specific safety conditions from OpenAI as part of approving its recapitalization: requirements to maintain AI safety oversight and protect teenagers on its platform. Those conditions exist partly because the nonprofit structure survived the restructuring. A full unwinding, which the jury never ordered, might have threatened them. For now, OpenAI's IPO path toward a potential trillion-dollar valuation is clearer than it was a week ago. Whether future AI labs converting from nonprofit status will face any meaningful legal accountability is a question the courts deferred rather than answered.