Jury unanimously dismisses Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI due to statute of limitations
A California jury dismissed unanimously on Monday Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman on the grounds that Musk failed to file a claim within the statute of limitations, providing a major legal victory for the AI company.
The nine-person jury, which played an advisory role, found that Musk missed the three-year deadline to file a complaint. OpenAI had argued that Musk waited too long and could not claim any harm occurred before August 2021. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez, who presided over the case, accepted the jury’s verdict and rejected Musk’s claims.
“The jury’s conclusion confirms that this lawsuit was a hypocritical attempt to sabotage a competitor and overcome a long history of very bad predictions about what OpenAI was and will become,” OpenAI attorney William Savitt said outside the courtroom after the ruling.
The ruling ends a three-week trial in an Oakland courtroom pitting Altman against Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX. Both entrepreneurs testified at the trial, alongside executives and legal experts from OpenAI and Microsoft.
Musk was seeking $150 billion in damages against OpenAI and the removal of Altman from the company’s leadership. A ruling in Musk’s favor could also have forced changes to OpenAI’s business structure and put a damper on the company’s planned IPO, expected later this year.
Musk’s legal team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Stealing from charity”?
The case stems from a lawsuit filed by Musk, the world’s richest man, in 2024, alleging that OpenAI, Altman and OpenAI Chairman Greg Brockman broke their promise to keep the company non-profit, instead turning it into a lucrative business now valued at $852 billion.
The case was “a classic story of altruism versus greed,” Musk said in his complaint.
Microsoft, which formed a partnership with OpenAI in 2019, was also named as a defendant. On Monday, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company welcomed “the jury’s decision to reject these allegations as improper.”
“The primary focus of the trial, whether OpenAI broke its charitable mission by spinning off its for-profit arm and accepting an investment from Microsoft for its AI technology, is now largely attenuated because it eliminates the worst-case scenario,” WedBush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in a report.
Musk, who helped found OpenAI, invested $38 million in the company in its early years, which he said was intended for charitable purposes. In his suit, the billionaire claimed that OpenAI violated his charitable trust and that Altman and Brockman enriched themselves at his expense. Musk also accused Microsoft of aiding and abetting the breach of trust.
‘It’s not okay to steal from charity,’ Musk said during his testimony. The boss of SpaceX and Tesla missed the end of the trial for join President Trump and a delegation of billionaire American leaders for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
OpenAI was founded as an AI research lab in 2015. Four years later, the Silicon Valley company created a for-profit subsidiary that it said would be governed by the nonprofit entity.
During the trial, two law professors, Daniel Hemel of New York University and John Coates of Harvard, said they saw no problem with OpenAI’s for-profit entity formed in partnership with Microsoft. “It generated value for the nonprofit,” on the order of $200 billion, Coates said.
Microsoft had generated $9.5 billion in revenue from the OpenAI partnership as of March 2025, according to Michael Wetter, head of corporate development at Microsoft, who testified at the trial.
