Jury unanimously dismisses Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI due to statute of limitations

A California jury unanimously dismissed claims against OpenAI and Sam Altman on Monday due to the statute of limitations, delivering a victory to the AI company and its founder in a high-stakes case brought by Elon Musk.

The nine-person jury found that Musk missed the three-year statute of limitations. OpenAI had argued that Musk waited too long and could not claim damages from before August 2021.

The decision caps a three-week trial in an Oakland courtroom, pitting Altman against Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX.

Both Altman and Musk testified during the trial, along with OpenAI and Microsoft executives and legal experts. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers presided over the case, with the jury serving in an advisory role.

Musk was seeking $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Altman’s removal from company leadership. A decision in Musk’s favor could also have forced changes to OpenAI’s business structure and thrown a wrench into the company’s plan to go public, expected later this year. 

Musk’s legal team and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“Stealing a charity”?

The case stemmed from a lawsuit Musk, the world’s richest man, brought in 2024, alleging that OpenAI, Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman broke their promise to keep the company a nonprofit, instead turning it into a money-making venture that is now valued at $852 billion.

The case was a “textbook tale of altruism versus greed,” Musk said in his suit.

Microsoft, which formed a partnership with OpenAI in 2019, was also named as a defendant.

“The biggest focus of the trial around if OpenAI broke its charitable mission when they spun off its for-profit arm and accepted an investment from Microsoft for its AI technology is now mostly alleviated as it takes a worst-case scenario off the table,” WedBush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in a report. 

Musk, who helped co-found OpenAI, invested $38 million in the company during its early years, which he argued was intended for charitable purposes. In his suit, the billionaire claimed OpenAI breached its charitable trust and that Altman and Brockman enriched themselves at his expense. Musk also accused Microsoft of aiding and abetting the trust breach.

“It’s not OK to steal a charity,” Musk said during his testimony. The head of SpaceX and Tesla missed the tail end of the trial to join President Trump and a delegation of billionaire U.S. executives 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, which 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, testified that they didn’t see any issues with OpenAI’s for-profit entity formed in partnership with Microsoft. “It’s generated value for the non-profit,” somewhere in the $200 billion range, Coates said.

Microsoft had made $9.5 billion in revenue from the OpenAI partnership as of March 2025, according to Michael Wetter, a corporate development executive at Microsoft, who testified during the trial.