Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

techcrunch.com

1,097 pointsnycdatasci595 comments

Because no one has commented yet on the legal significance:

Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.

Because the statute of limitations is a precondition, the jury was not asked to find any other facts. They may tell the press what they thought on other issues, or they may not.

The judge was prepared to immediately accept the jury’s finding, and said she agreed that the jury’s decision was supported by the evidence.

It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely. Whether Musk’s claims are barred by the statute of limitations is a quintessential question of fact, and appellate courts are extraordinarily deferential to factual findings by juries so as a practical matter it’s almost impossible to appeal this verdict.

My own thoughts:

If I had been on the jury, I would have found against Musk on every point.

His lawyers created a “3 phases of doubt” to try and sidestep the statute of limitations, but it was clearly bogus and he was on notice of OpenAI creating a for-profit in 2019.

Musk was perfectly happy to have OpenAI be a for-profit, a non-profit with an attached for-profit (the current structure), or even just absorbed into Tesla. His complaints fell flat for me given the number of emails where he said that a non-profit was likely a mistake.

This is technical, but Musk clearly never created a charitable trust, which was a precondition for his claims. His funds were donated for general use by OpenAI, not for any specific use that would allow him to claim breach of charitable trust. Also, all of his funds were spent by no later than 2020 which is before his alleged breach in 2023.

Musk unreasonably delayed bringing this case until the success of ChatGPT and starting a competing AI company, and he had unclean hands because he attempted to sabotage OpenAI repeatedly by poaching its key staff while on the board.

As I read around, this lawsuit raised an important question: can a non-profit become a for-profit company?

To that extent, what Musk was happy or unhappy with is irrelevant. What is actually allowed by the law is more important.

However, it seems that the lawsuit was not phrased that way and Musk just looked for damages to himself. In that frame it's not much of a surprise that things ended this way.

There is a well established procedure for these things, happens in hospitals etc. Not a new question a jury needs to address.

> can a non-profit become a for-profit company?

Presumably a non-profit can move all its staff and its stuff into a for-profit anyway.

Would Musk have standing for asking that question about non-profit to for profit companies? I think this would be a role for the government rather than a private individual and the Trump admin is not exactly fond of enforcing regulations.

> If I had been on the jury, I would have found ...

No, you wouldn't.

The case was thrown out of court before you have any chance to comment or decide on that.

Jury don't randomly "found" something. The court ask questions, the Jury answers those.

Juries are the "finders of fact". That's the phrase often used anyway.

> The case was thrown out of court before you have any chance to comment or decide on that.

No, it has been decided by the jury https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69013420/572/musk-v-alt...

> Jury don't randomly "found" something. The court ask questions, the Jury answers those.

And here the jury has been asked questions about the statute of limitation, which is exactly what the parent commenter is referring to.

It's even more preposterous that you can predetermine what a stranger would have done on that jury.

Musk should have just made another company and then he’d have another 500 billion but he had that mistake and now it’s over. Then again we’ll see how well open ai does over the long term

Evidence at trial showed that Musk attempted to pursue AGI at Tesla starting in 2017 before he left the board of OpenAI. He was unsuccessful in that endeavor and later restarted his efforts in xAI after the success of ChatGPT.

This is not about money for him, this was always about control. When they wouldn't give him complete control over the project, he pulled out and probably expected OAI to fold without his support. But they survived, and he eventually realised that he had made a huge mistake by giving up all of his influence over SOTA AI research.

I sometimes wonder, what does one need a second 500 billion that the first 500 billion is not enough for?

I think this is missing the main point that Musk was never the owner of OpenAI, neither was Sam, nor the employees. The owners are the American people. I presume Musk got a tax rebate from his donation, courtesy of the taxpayer; so did every other donor.

The fact is, OpenAI was a non-profit belonging to the public and it was appropriated by the donors... Who already got their tax cuts.

This is setting a precedent that if you donate a certain amount of money to a charity, you can later convert it to a for-profit and claim to be an owner of the charity... On the basis of 'donations' which you got a tax rebate from. Very convenient.

OpenAI donors should have created a new, separate, for-profit entity completely distinct from OpenAI, with a different name, poached the original employees, implemented all the logic from scratch, collected all the training data from scratch... This would have been correct. Basically what Anthropic did seems more like the correct way.

OpenAI Foundation is a corporation established in Delaware. It has received it's 501(c)3 status from the IRS which means donations are deductible to the fullest extent of the law (or some such; it's been a long time since I've had to write that). The American people do not own the foundation.

As for the OpenAI that is a public benefits corporation, I know nothing about all the ins and outs of that type of corporation.

No one owns a nonprofit, so your analogy is fundamentally incorrect and based on a misunderstanding of how nonprofits work.

It is actually extremely important that no one “owns” a nonprofit in the way shareholders own a corporation. A nonprofit has no equity owners. It has directors/officers with fiduciary duties, and its assets must be used consistently with its charitable/public-benefit purpose.

But to be clear, that is in no way equivalent, even metaphorically, to it being "owned by the public".

“Public benefit” does not mean “whatever the median taxpayer would vote for” or “whatever the government currently approves of.” It includes many causes supported by small, unpopular, eccentric, religious, ideological, scientific, or advocacy-oriented communities, so long as the organization fits within an exempt purpose and does not operate for impermissible private benefit.

simple examples can easily elucidate this. One can found a nonprofit for a purpose that society generally disagree with. For instance: - a nonprofit to advocate for the rights of hemorrhagic fevers as living organisms - nonprofit museum devoted to preserving a deeply unpopular ideology’s historical artifacts - a nonprofit to educate the public about an eccentric scientific theory - a nonprofit advocating for legal recognition of some fringe moral concern

All of these could be legitimate nonprofits under the law, even though we may deeply disagree with them. This is by design.

The intellectual property (code, data) was transferred from the nonprofit to the for-profit for about $60M, which is what an independent firm hired to assess the value said the IP was worth in late 2018 / early 2019. The nonprofit itself was never converted to a for-profit, and indeed remains a nonprofit to this day.

The $60M in IP has grown to about a $200B stake in the OpenAI for-profit.

I don't understand your reasoning here. You seem to be suggesting that non-profits are owned by the American people?

Is there some part of this that I'm missing where this was true of OpenAI at some point?

I'm unfamiliar with the US legal system but do they really need a jury and a trial to determine whether the claims are barred by the statute of limitations? Couldn't this be decided by a judge before trial?

Part of the Statute of Limitations isn't just on when he filed the claim, but when he found out or should have found out, by reasonable diligence that he had a claim at all.

So the question before the jury has a significant component of "Should he have found out by this time?" Which is a question of fact, and facts are typically decided by juries, in the US at least.

The two parties can agree together to let a judge decide facts like this, but generally, if one or the other party wants it to go to a jury, it does.

I'm guessing part of Musk's strategy was to have it go to the jury, which are often seen as easier to manipulate than judges, especially when a case is weak. Or perhaps his team already knew this particular judge would be inclined to rule against him, so did the next best thing.

Also, it's worth pointing out that the jury was obviously correct. Musk was lying his ass off. There is no possible way to imagine that Elon Musk, the hyper-online dude obsessed with news, AI, and AI news, would not be aware of the well-publicized events of a company he was personally massively invested in.

Elon argued that even though the events in question took place sometime between 2017 and 2020 OpenAI intentionally hid the information from him until 2022-2023 which is why he wasn't able to file the lawsuit until 2024.

That's what the jury found against - they said he was reasonably informed enough to have brought the suit earlier and thus the 3 year clock should start ticking in 2020 not 2023.

In the US, judges make determinations of law, but juries (in a jury trial at least) must evaluate the evidence to make findings of fact. So the jury would need to make a finding as to when the statute of limitations started ticking based on the evidence, and the judge then makes the legal determination that the statutory period has lapsed.

In the American system juries figure out questions of fact and judges figure out questions of law.

In this case I guess the question was 'when did the incident actually happen' with Elon arguing it was later then Altman.

In the US (I believe all common law systems), the jury is the trier of fact. If there is a genuine factual dispute between the two parties in a lawsuit, then that dispute is resolved by a jury (unless the parties opt-out).

Statutes of limitations are usually not tried by juries because the underlying facts that cause them to kick in are usually not in actual dispute. Instead a fight over statute of limitation is more likely to be over which statute applies or whether some other mitigating circumstance is kicking in, which are matters of law which do not go to a jury.

I'll piggyback and I'll ask a hypothetical question: imagine a scenario where there's a jury out there and the lawyers proved something almost perfectly, as perfect as something proven by lawyers can get. Now jury goes to deliberate/discuss and for some reason unanimously decides to rule in a way that goes totally against that proof provided - for any reason (maybe just for the kicks, ignore that; because I guess it is ignored). What happens then? Can a judge say to that "bugger off, this is bs" or something like that instead offer their own judgement or have another jury or so? Or is it - tough luck, jury is jury, deal with it. And they can appeal if there's scope of appeal (don't know how that is decided whether one can appeal or not to begin with).

I think that there have been such instances - (I can only speculate, but I think that) the judge can rule a mistrial, or it can be heard on appeal.

Ah google to the rescue:

> In the U.S., a jury’s factual findings can only be challenged post-trial if an appellate court or trial judge determines that no reasonable jury could have reached that verdict based on the evidence.

And

Civil Cases - (Judgment as a Matter of Law / JNOV): Governed by Rule 50 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a judge can overturn a jury’s factual finding if the evidence is legally insufficient to support it.

Criminal Cases - (Insufficiency of the Evidence): Under the Fifth Amendment's Double Jeopardy clause, an acquittal cannot be appealed or overturned. However, after a guilty verdict, a defendant can file a motion challenging the evidence, asserting that the facts do not support the conviction

Things like that have happened before.

It’s called Jury Nullification.

More info below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

In this case the judge determined that it did require a trial and refused to dismiss based on statute of limitations.

There was a way that the statute of limitations hadn't run out as the clock started when Elon became aware of OpenAI's shift to for-profit ambitions. That made it more subjective of a judgement than simply reading a calendar, so it went to a jury to determine when Elon knew OpenAI started planning to change structure to be for-profit, then they could look at a calendar.

Bit late, but since I don’t see any correct answers here - no a jury is not required here. The judge chose to convene an *advisory* jury here — likely to strengthen the factual findings of the court and maybe to save the court itself some time/effort.

If it’s a very clear fact yes a judge can make the call. In this case what Musk knew was part of that and a jury then had to make the call on what the fact was.

That's like saying can't the Judge decide who the killer was when he literally saw the video of shooting.

Or like if a piece of evidence was obtained lawfully?

I can understand why people and me included might think they can decide this before trial.

These days, video evidence can be called into doubt pretty easily

One still need to decide:

- if the video is real (not AI / edited / another event)

- if the subject the same person (twins, look alike, too bury to tell)

etc

It’s quite an odd ruling given that OpenAI completed its for profit “conversion” last fall.

It seems the biggest value loss to the nonprofit was in this conversion, not in the initial for profit subsidiary creation giving investors capped profit shares.

But this "conversion" was apparently not the focus of the suit, according to OP. Perhaps it occurred after they initiated legal proceedings?

Correct, Musk based his claims on the 2023 Microsoft deal.

The 2025 recapitalization was discussed at trial, but it was ancillary since all that changed was the existing for-profit changed from a capped-profit with weird cash flow mechanics to a traditional public benefit corp with ordinary equity.

It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely.

He doesn't have to win to succeed.

The richest man on the planet can keep his enemies tied up in court needlessly until the day he dies.

The guy he's suing is also a billionaire who can keep his enemies tied up in court needlessly until the day he dies, although that billionaire's net worth is only around 1% of Elon Musk's, so in a sense you're right that Musk is picking on the little guy.

Or just ruin their already shaky reputations.

I assumed it was trash already.

> Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims.

I think Musk's lawyers told him he'd probably lose this suit before he filed it. I suspect he proceeded mostly out of spite and to embarrass Altman by ensuring the concerns even his friends had about his candor and trustworthiness went on the record and were splashed across the media. Musk knew he had little chance of unwinding the theft of a non-profit (and I doubt he cared much about that).

It would have been much better if Musk had actually cared enough about OAI's original mission to bring suit in 2019. However, I'm still glad Musk did this now because Altman and Brockman (with the help of MSFT and others) DID steal a non-profit, or at least subverted it's mission. And this fleeting bit of public embarrassment (funded by Musk for other spiteful reasons) is the only penalty they'll ever see.

For people unfamiliar, generally speaking in trial courts the jury is the finder of facts and the judge is the finder of law (yes, there are bench trials where the judge does both). As an aside, appeals courts deal in legal issues (ie statutory interpretations and constitutional issues).

So not being within the statute of limitations is typically a legal issue so what must've happened here is the jury would've been asked if the earlier OpenAI-MS deals were substantially similar to the latest deal. I can't find the verdict form or the jury instructions but I'll bet that was the key issue the jury decided.

That fact here was if Musk should have known about the potential breach of charitable trust before 2021 given it started in 2019, if not before, with Microsoft investment and he didn't sue until 2024. There is a 3 year statute of limitations.

Don't forget rich people spend their lives suing for the sake of annoying each other.

More often than not the sentences are irrelevant, it's known that it's a lost cause, and they will still proceed if it can bring any dirt or bad publicity or annoyance to the counter party.

>Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.

Why is a hypothetical ground for this decision? "You didn't complain immediately the first time you got robbed, therefore all the robbing since then is covered by a statute of limitation".

The statute of limitations exists to prevent unreasonable delay, to protect defendants from prejudice due to loss of evidence to the passage of time, and to recognize that people who are injured tend to complain immediately and not sit on their claims.

This case demonstrates why. Musk only complained after OpenAI was commercially successful with ChatGPT and after he started a competing effort. He repeatedly said “I do not know” and “I do not recall” on the stand, and argued that the passage of time made it hard for him to remember facts that would have been helpful for OpenAI.

I know why statutes of limitation exist. I was wondering why it applied here. Apparently it wasn't completely straightforward, as nine jurors were needed to reach a decision on that point, instead of a single judge or even clerk.

Because there has to be some point. It's unjust to allow someone to sue 30 years later, as everyone would have a sword of Damocles hanging over their head waiting for the right moment to strike. And in general, if you didn't realize you were robbed for 3 years, perhaps it's the case that you weren't actually robbed.

So if I exchange your Rolex with a fake one and then you try to sell after 3 years and you notice it’s fake, it’s fine for you?

There are multiple reasons why statutes of limitations exist, one of them being that the further away in time, the harder it is to prove evidence. Witnesses may have died, or their memory may be more faulty.

Also criminal liability is generally handled differently. Some jurisdictions have no limit, and where the limits exist for criminal liability, limitations on serious crimes can be much longer than the civil ones.

https://localnewsmatters.org/2026/05/16/musk-v-altman-week-3... has a good explanation of the legalities:

"If the jury determines that at any time before those dates, Musk either knew — or had or should have known — that he had a claim that he could bring, then his suit was brought too late. The consequence of being too late is swift and absolute. If the lawsuit was filed late for a particular claim, that claim is out of the case; if it was too late for all of Musk’s claims, the lawsuit is over."

That's where the question of fact (i.e., the requirement for a jury decision) came in: "What was the statute of limitations?" is a question of law, but "When should Musk have known that OpenAI was moving too much toward for-profit?" is a question of fact (and, here, determines whether the statute of limitations applies).

This is not a robbery, though. Not in the "break in and steal stuff from your house multiple times" situation. Legally, each of those are separate events, and one doesn't really affect the other unless it's all the same person, and the repetition is used to get a stronger case, etc.

There are several legal principles in play here. Note that these are civil trial issues and when you're talking about "robbing", you're likely talking about a criminal issue. These are:

1. Estoppel. If a party relies on your conduct then you can lose the right to sue over it;

2. Laches. This is a defense against prejudicial conduct, typically by waiting too long to take action;

3. Waiver. Your conduct can waive your right to sue. Imagine you live with someone and they don't pay half of the rent so you cover it. At some point your continued conduct means you lose the right to sue; and

4. The statute of limitations. Some claims simply have to be brought within a certain period. How this applies can be really complex. For example, we saw this in Trump's fraud convictions in New York. His time in office, away from the jurisdiction, essentially suspended the statute of limitations.

Some crimes like murder have no statute of limitations. Others have unreasonably short statutes of limitations. For example, probably nobody can be charged in relation to sex trafficking in the Epstein saga because the statute of limitations is often 5 years with such crimes. This is unreasonable (IMHO) because often the victims are children and unable to make a criminal complaint.

It's also worth adding that not all legal systems have such wide-ranging statutes of limitation as the US does. Founding principles of those other legal systems is that the government shouldn't be arbitrarily restricted for prosecuting criminal conduct. The US system ostensibly favors "timely" prosecution.

> the victims are children and unable to make a criminal complaint.

I thought that children at any age can complain to the police. The filing side on the criminal case is "State" -- or "People", or "Rex/Regina" (and not the person complaining, regardless of the age.)

thanks for the snippet

There sure was a lot of days of testimony on Sam Altman lying, for this to come down to " statute of limitations".

Shouldn't the defense have raised the statute of limitations much earlier?

You raise all your defenses in the trial, you only get one. If they'd wanted to put all their eggs on the statute of limitations point then they could, but you can understand why defense lawyers generally don't do that.

Agree. If this is a precondition, why force people to share their diaries and stuff? Is it all to claim they hid material things that would have led to an earlier filing?

From other comments, it came down to when Musk could reasonably be judged as aware of the injury.

If it's thrown out on a technicality then Musk got fleeced by his lawyers - good for them.

Aside from the disagreements between these parties, what about the precedent of running a non-profit, and then transferring all IP to a for profit when it’s convenient to do so?

I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.

This case sets no precedent one way or the other on that question. The IP was transferred to the for-profit for fair value in 2019, and Musk never argued otherwise in this case.

The attorneys general of California and Delaware could challenge that 2019 IP transfer if they so wished on behalf of the public.

Which they are unlikely to do because the California AG signed off on the original IP transfer agreement…

Transactions like that happen all the time and are not problematic if handled legally. Any of the interested parties could have sued over it, but none have.

The interested parties would be taxpayers. I think some groups are trying to look into it.

The issue is that they did R&D as a charity, donations to which are tax deductible, there may also be other benefits to being a charity during R&D but that’s a big one, then once the thing works, setup a for profit, sell ip at “fair value”, get some investment, then things are ready for business.

I read there’s no statute of limitations on a tax issue like this, so I guess it might be hanging over them indefinitely.

I’m not a big taxation and government fan, they’d probably just waste the money anyways. It does seem unfair OpenAI gets to use this loophole though, unless all companies can make their R&D investment tax deductible, and get any other benefits of this setup.

The interested parties are the taxpayers, and in this case the legal mechanism for that was the California Attorney General approving OpenAI's restructuring. Here's the MOU: https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/Final...

There is no loophole here.

Because they got to participate in the early investment in the for profit entity.

> Early Angels (Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and others): Approximately $10 million invested, current value $1.4 billion. That corresponds to a return of around 140x.

Or more specifically: One just did sue, but lost because he waited too long.

The non-profit received shares in the for-profit as a result of the transfer. Those shares are theoretically worth hundreds of billions.

If it had been a for-profit company contributing assets to another for-profit company, the transaction would not have had any different tax consequence.

Wasn't an arms length transaction so shennanigans (or lack of) cannot be proved.

(This is just a thought IANAL)

Or a self dealing conversion.

Yeah. I wonder if the question "Did OpenAI steal a non-profit worth what is now maybe hundreds of billions of dollars?" will ever be answered. If not it will be one of the biggest heists in history.

Of course that question has been answered. They stole it.

Only people who are pretending to be confused are people for whom it's in their interest to be confused.

They created a non-profit with the intention of launching AI to make sure that it would stay in the public trust, and then once it became really valuable, they spirited it away into private hands.

It's just a fact. It's obvious from looking at the thing. The details are designed to confuse and trick you into thinking that what you can plainly see happening is OK somehow.

The gvt won't have much of a leg to stand on until open ai actually turns a profit, until then how are taxpayers cheated? And by then it will be a taxable for profit corporation anyway.

Can we just bring some reality to this conversation. The non-profit still exists, it owns a significant chunk of a now almost trillion dollar company, and the for-profit wouldn't be profitable if it weren't for Billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft.

There is no counter factual where OpenAI exists as a non-profit and still inexplicably gets handed billions of dollars of compute to train LLMs. The for-profit company is a different thing from the non-profit and it exists for perfectly understandable reasons and I'm unsure why anyone other than Elon Musk pretends this doesn't make sense.

What is your proposed counter factual where the non-profit entity retains all ownership of the venture, but somehow finds hundreds of billions of dollars to train LLMs?

An alternative chain of events might be one where OpenAI, Inc. only operated through income and donations, which would probably lead to them scaling more slowly. They could also take on loans.

Having thought about this whole thing more I believe that non-profits should not be a separate type of entity that gets special tax treatment. People have different ideas of what constitutes legitimate non-profit activity. It just opens things up for tax avoidance and scams.

My suspicion is that winning might have been a secondary goal. When OpenAI goes to IPO, all the testimony of former executives about Altman's behavior is going to be in the public record. A lot of that testimony makes OpenAI sound very chaotic and poorly run. That could prevent large institutional investors from wanting to take the risk.

Musk texted OpenAI's Brockman about a settlement two days before trial.

So I take that to mean Musk wanted a settlement as primary goal, and that the threat to OpenAI's reputation was just an (unsuccessful) means to get what he wanted. That isn't to say it wasn't personal for Musk, just that he would have preferred to have gotten paid.

As to Musk texting "By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be" when the settlement offer was turned down, while I'd agree there were a ton of super embarrassing details that came out I don't think Musk was successful in making them more hated than even he is. I don't even think this secondary goal was successful, even though there were a ton of juicy bits.

It's hard to know without knowing the terms of the settlement. It could have easily been something he knew OpenAI would find to be unacceptable.

I think regardless it would be extremely hard for him to make people hate Altman et al. more than himself. Altman's flaws are more subtle and require paying attention to a pattern of behavior. Musk has beem pure cringe for 5+ years now.

It seems like the real sour grapes are over the fact they wouldn't let him run OpenAI. If he cared about a payday, ironically, he probably would have had more success because he would have brought this suit sooner.

My friend and I went to play poker this weekend. Demis Hassabis was there. I whispered to him “what the hell, that’s Demis Hassabis”!

My friend had no idea who he was. My friend doesn’t work in tech but he’s in his late 20s and we are both British so I was quite surprised. My guess is most of the world has no idea who these people are, despite their influence they are very niche celebrities.

Maybe Sam is more famous but I’d guess ~no one knows Greg Brockman.

So I find “most hated men in America” quite dramatic!

> "By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be"

Isn't this blackmail?

I think courts would likely see it as trash talk. In this trial, the judge wouldn't let the jury see it, given settlement discussions are not allowed into evidence.

>A lot of that testimony makes OpenAI sound very chaotic and poorly run. That could prevent large institutional investors from wanting to take the risk.

Judging by the sheer number of journalistic investigations into OpenAI and the number of accounts of former employees, I would have expected that OpenAI being chaotic and poorly run is common knowledge by now and the lawsuit doesn't add much more to it.

It adds detail

"Risk".... "AI".... have you SEEN the stock market???

It's not a bad theory, but I think you're making the logical man's mistake of trying to ascribe a lot of intelligence and strategy to a move because on the surface it's irrational. Not every villain's move is a mysterious Xanatos gambit. Sometimes billionaire assholes just do dumb stuff because they can and/or because they're full of small-minded hatred.

Sometimes rich, powerful people do stuff that's irrational. When you see Trump attack Iran and you think "this doesn't appear to make sense," you can reason "there must have been secret intelligence proving that Iran was about to nuke Israel because otherwise it was a stupid move," or you can reason "it didn't make sense because it was a stupid move."

I think this depends on point of view. I do think much of this comes down to sour grapes that they didn't let Elon control OpenAI, and this is the wedge he chose to retaliate. Would he have sour grapes if he didn't want to win the AI race himself?

Really comes down to what you think his primary motivation is and what are just benefits.

When Musk signed on to help OpenAI initially, he claimed it was to set up guardrails so AI would be aligned with the best interests of humans.

After OpenAI went for-profit and China became a significant AI powerhouse, he no longer cares about safety and just insists that his team get “there “ (whatever the destination is) before “they” do. I’m not so certain he has a coherent belief system, but is probably further into AI psychosis or paranoid delusions than we want to believe.

Terrible options for a person with some of the most wealth in the tech world and perhaps just as influential, given that he effectively ensured Trump won in 2024, had direct foreign policy comms with Putin post-2022, controls the only cost-effective gateway to space, was given the keys to destroy his own regulators, is impregnating dozens of women (but perhaps not paying for those kids), etc.

That's fair although I didn't mean to imply that I thought it was a rational move. I think if he had won, it might have actually been worse for him (who knows what the collateral damage to the AI bubble would have been). I just think his goal was mostly to do as much harm as possible to people he clearly hates.

I think you're being too generous, one of the big take aways from the trial was that Musk's other AI effort - xAI is a total shit show, and that most of the experts here don't think Musk understands how to run an AI lab. Which is a problem since Musk wants to IPO SpaceX with a story about AI. Admittedly there's been lots of other news that also embarases him in this area.

dump it on retail, thats the plan with one less step

if this was the case Musk himself would be homeless and not “richest” person on earth

Im just curious what gives you an idea Musk and his cronies are actually intelligent enough to do this.

I wonder if Elon ever expected to win, or even cared about winning. It's been obvious for a while that OpenAI becoming for-profit historically wasn't really an issue for him, despite what he says in public these days. I imagine that for him the goal was always to damage OpenAI's reputation in order to distract them from progress or raising capital, giving xAI more time to catch up.

I don't think it's a coincidence he didn't bring this suit until after the Altman ouster debacle. Discovery was probably the real objective all along.

I think the same. As much as I like Elon's companies, this case seemed like a strategy, and part envy. He wants to be the first in everything

yeah, he had a secret plan to file his lawsuit late. Real n-dimensional chess here.

I don't say this in a "what a brilliant tactician he is" sense. I think AI in general caught him off guard and he was upset they didn't let him run OpenAI.

I'm sure his lawyers told him he wasn't likely to win, so have to assume embarrassment of OpenAI was the goal.

>so have to assume embarrassment of OpenAI was the goal.

Why do you have to assume that?

The amount of cope people have around Elon’s irrational drug addict behavior is insane. Was lying about being good at video games and getting caught also 8D chess too?

Anybody read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."

Wait but that’s the crux of his argument that he was “wronged”. Not “wronged but only once xAI started competing with OpenAI”. He can’t prove the former, if the latter is true.

If anyone is/was truly still wronged by OpenAI changing corporate structure they are still able to sue and prove damages. Yet surprisingly no one has come forward on this.

Nobody else has come forward because the number of people with a potential legal claim for asserting any such harm was a small group of between 2 and 6 people, of which Musk was one (setting aside SOL issues).

Maybe one of the scientists who cashed out 8 figures will file a suit that OpenAI has wronged them by depriving them of the joy of working

Yeah people are going to make up a lot of reasons why Elon lost that have nothing to do with the actual and very simple reason.

I did, but I think most people here are just reacting to everybody else's differing opinions cause most if not all have a love/hate relationship with Musk. Doubt anybody here is actually reading the story and understanding and failing to understand the new future legal implications, e.g. a critical shift in legal thinking which will force a greater focus on security practices of AI development companies aka "security audit" defense. As stated by an earlier poster, this could lead to a future plaintiff arguing that a company's failure to adequately secure its confidential information will be enough to constitute a fundamental breach of its contractual obligations, irrespective of how the info was subsequently leaked.

Sol Roth

Right. Nobody cares whether Musk won or lost (well maybe a few do). People actually following the case wanted to know whether OpenAI would be held in any way accountable for anything. And this “resolution” does not satisfy. Before Musk got involved, what happened at OpenAI was a BigProblem for many people.

I feel like there still needs to be a penalty to OpenAI here even if that doesn't favor Musk (even though he funded the whole thing). It is still a theft.

Need standing to claim theft, need to be within statue of limitations.

It's not theft unless a jury says it is, they didn't say it is.

Every AI model swallowing the entire world of digital and physical data to then be resold back to the people will forever be the biggest heist ever pulled off in our lifetime. I’m shocked how little it gets talked about, and how convenient it is that many of these companies lost or burned their paper trails

1. No if anything, the idea that works cant be built using other products without the express permission of the original author would be the greater heist.

2. This has nothing to do with the case which was just Musk trying to punish his competitor.

The jury didn't say it isn't either. All they ruled on was that it was too late for Musk to even broach the question.

I think that your first statement is correct.

I do not think that your second was correct.

O.J. Simpson comes to mind.

My theory is this civil suit was used to expose Sam's (and Greg's) self-dealing and perjury. This was civil, now comes criminal.

You'd have to figure who stole what from whom though. OpenAI stole OpenAI from OpenAI?

Reached for comment by TechCrunch, Musk’s lead counsel Marc Toberoff said, “One word: Appeal.”

One wonders on what grounds?

In the UK, in a civil case like this, the judge I think comments on the likelihood of an appeal avenue once the verdict has been reached.

To be fair, is there any corporation or high net worth individual ever who, after losing a lawsuit, said “You know what, we accept the court’s decision that we were wrong and will be reflecting on how to do better in the future.”

Never. That never ever happens.

The lawyer himself is guaranteed another 6 months of lucrative work of they appeal...

Whereas no appeal is effectively him getting fired.

Is this the right view? I would imagine Elon Musk has essentially infinite demand for lawyers. The choice for the lawyers is probably work on this absolutely dead case where all the facts are not just against them, but highly embarrassing for their principal, or work on some other case where there would be perks like having the possibility of winning the case. I'm quite certain highly trained, highly successful, expensive lawyers aren't jumping up and down in excitement to work on cases they quite well know are meritless.

They'll do it, because that's what Elon Musk wants them to do and he's paying them and they want his other business, but this isn't what gets them up in the morning.

On the grounds of "I have infinite money and lawyers to drag this thing out forever, whether I'll win or not."

Nothing like 'vexatious litigation' in the US?

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vexatious-litigants

There is, but it's a pretty high bar to clear. Merely exhausting one's appeals does not qualify as vexatious. He could keep going for years as long as his lawyers make vaguely plausible arguments each time.

Muddying the right of appeal with vexatious litigation is a very dark road to go down.

I'm sure people in the US are in no mood to take any advice from us here in the UK, having just recently abolished the right to a jury trial.

You are allowed your appeals. That's part of your constitutional right to due process.

There are some exceptions to this, but they are rare and usually only employed in extreme situations (aka things which would get the lawyers involved debarred).

To any lawyers in here, is there an argument to be made for the statue of limitations not to apply here

No. Once the jury made its finding of fact as to when the event giving rise to the claim occurred (and to when the SOL clock would start ticking), the appeal would have to determine that the jury could not have reasonably made such a finding. It's very, very rare for an appeals court to overturn a finding of fact.

Out interest how does it work with new evidence then? I guess in civil less likely than criminal (new DNA technology etc.)

> One wonders on what grounds?

Invent a time machine; send a lawyer back to file a new lawsuit within the statute of limitations.

Two words: “billable hours”

Typically if they bring up a case like this a judge again will get pissy and dismiss it with prejudice.

You can try to file it again, but that gets to the point where the judge can throw your ass directly in jail for 30 days, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.

Filing the same lawsuit a second time is different. They're talking about appealing the decision in this case. You don't get tossed in jail for that.

But (at least in the US), the appeals court does not have to accept your appeal. When you file the appeal, you have to give them enough reason for them to even listen to your appeal, instead of rejecting it from the first filing.

He lost on the grounds of a statue of limitations defense which is exactly the kind of thing which is easily appealable.

A state of limitations case is actually one of the strongest kinds of legal defenses a defendant can have.

It's a foundational issue that goes to whether the court is even allowed to proceed with the case. A defendant could be guilty/liable/whatever of the alleged claims, and it wouldn't matter. If the statute of limitations has run, they're in the clear.

The only counter to an SOL defense is to try and claim that the SOL was paused for some reason, but those exceptions are very narrow and wouldn't apply here (and in the real world very rarely apply to civil cases).

Are you a lawyer? IANAL but my understanding is it would be difficult for an appeal to succeed. Appeals courts only evaluate review matters of law, not of fact. Whether is has been more than the 3 year limit the statute of limitations places is a matter of fact I think. And the advisory jury makes this much harder to appeal. What do you think the grounds for appeal will be?

Pretty sure it's the opposite: appeals mostly only work when the decision is not clear cut, and the statute of limitations is.

In this case, I think it is a jury's finding of fact re: the statute of limitations. Unless the appellate court finds that the trial court and jury is clearly erroneous, it will usually give significant deference to that finding.

Based on the "My Calendar Has 13 Months" defense?

Or the "I Forgot It Was Tuesday" argument?

This was one trial where I didn’t want either side to win

Yes, pity they couldn't lose both.

And somehow I still feel worse off that Musk lost?

"Musk announced on X that he will be appealing the decision. "The judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality," he wrote."

Musk is an idiot

Lawyers will be happy to take more of his money

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/18/1137488/elon-mus...

I don't understand why this is a Musk lawsuit and not an IRS lawsuit. How can you take donations under a charity org and then convert it to a for profit corp?

The strongest evidence against Musk was Musk. His own 2017 emails supporting for-profit chats made the "betrayal" narrative very hard to sell.

There was no decision made on this basis. It was dismissed entirely due to the elapsed statute of limitations.

Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him.

e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.

To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.

As a business transaction: Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.

As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.

On the other hand, buying twitter was the turning point for his public image. Before that, he was Tony Stark. Now he's Lex Luthor.

Did the total of fines the US gov't was looking to levy on Musk total up to more than the $44Billion he spent on Twitter?

I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?

My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.

A more "hardcore" team will keep telling him he can win on appeals, and bill accordingly.

His case was handled as well as any lawyer could have. He signed the deal and then tried to change his mind. That's not how contracts work, and the legal system and status quo have strong interests in keeping it that way.

Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."

And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business

Yeah but he was able to personally make the call to kill millions of people around the world, he's just going back to his roots.

Obviously Trump was not going to be a champion of clean, renewable energy. If he knew the "Trump thing" was coming -- which thanks to his position inside Twitter he probably did -- then the rational thing to do was, in fact, what he did. Suck up to Trump to try to avoid or shape the outcome.

What he didn't need to do was alienate his existing customers by acting like he enjoyed it. Did he actually think he was going to sell a lot of EVs to Trumpers?

Extreme smartness has its own failure modes

After the many years, there have been insider voices indicating that success was despite Musk in many ways. Musk bought his way into cutting edge tech, it succeeded despite him due to the already amazing people working in the industries. The projects that have his actual involvement are pretty regularly seen as mistakes or flops.

I personally hold to the idea that whoever at SpaceX crafted the team used to pre-occupy Musk and keep him entertained while the rest of the company worked, is largely responsible for its success.

I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.

He lost the lawsuit on a legal technicality about the statute of limitations not on substantive grounds.

Who cares if the plaintiff or defendant won? The trial had great expository value regarding all the players involved.

The lawsuit side, genuinely asking, how does the for-profit under non-profit setup work? What are the respective roles? Is the combination effectively a non-profit still? Or is this some kind of legal loophole to make profits under a non-profit?

Lots of non-profits use structures like that, it's not uncommon. Non-profit vs. for-profit is mostly a legal and accounting distinction; many laypeople confuse "non-profit" with "charity" and they are very different.

The Mozilla Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation. The Corporation hires the engineering staff that does the bulk of the work to develop Firefox (the rest are community/volunteer contributors and partners.)

I used to work for one. Probably not that similar, as one was a PBI. But one entity paid and billed back to the other. It was interesting to see how the way the 2 entities spent money differently.

Losing on a technicality kind of sucks ngl

It’s a finding of fact and a fundamental law not a ‘technicality’ but I can see that’s going to be the pro-elon position already.

I hope he appeals. Not cheering for Musk, cheering for the fight.

There's nothing to appeal. Statute of limitations is... just that.

IANAL but civil statute of limitations is based on when the prosecuting party reasonably discovered they were wronged and had legal recourse, not when the event happened. It is entirely possible to debate when that was in this case.

For criminal cases at least, the statue of limitations is not set in stone. But probably for civil, its much more cut and dry.

Cross examination is one of the vanishingly few times you can see billionaires and executives act like human beings instead of sentient PR scripts.

There is nothing that comes out of this fight. Open AI has lost to Anthropic and Google already. And Musk needs to be in prison.

It would just burn more cash unless he can somehow go back in time and change the facts.

If anyone can afford burning cash for his ego it's the richest man in the world with the biggest ego in the world.

Yes, and more burnt cash (and hopefully emotional energy) would be an acceptable outcome

Musk's pinned tweet:

Regarding the OpenAI case, the judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality.

There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity. The only question is WHEN they did it!

I will be filing an appeal with the Ninth Circuit, because creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America.

OpenAI was founded to benefit all of humanity.

As Buffett said, the difference between normal and rich people is that the second group spend their lives suing each others, and the closer they are or were the more lawsuits you get.

it was probably never about winning for Musk, but to leverage the legal system to air out some drama in open AI and some internal dialogue among the execs of the company for bad press.

The donation was also made through a donor advised fund (DAF), which means Musk didn't legally make the donation. I'm surprised he didn't lose on not having standing.

I'm sure this all has to do with lawyers making as much money as possible — but if that's a potential standing or statute question, why not have a jury settle that question first, before the trial starts? Or to have a narrower process focused only on discovery and facts related to the statute?

You can hate Musk all you want but between him and Scam I'd pick Musk any day.

What they did to him was unfair, he put in all the money, office and initial push, he deserves a piece of the pie he created. This is quite unfair towards him.

Should have done it sooner. He took his time. He should know timing is important: That's why he frequently skips getting approval for his construction work, dumps drilling fluids (while feigning compliance!)... or builds an illegal power plant. He usually seems to have little patience.

We're all supposed to play by the same rules.

He isn't asking for money tho? He is suing because he believes he was promised that it would be a not for profit forever.

But they have emails from one Elon Musk telling them to structure it roughly how it turned out.

They also have emails including Musk where the profit share is discussed, and his "investment" is talked about as roughly a donation.

Like he could have asked for a profit share at any point and it just doesn't seem to happen?

If the outcome is unfair to Musk, its because Musk worked tirelessly to ensure he had no legal standing with which to make it fair to Musk.

It’s dissapointing that the only significant obstacle standing in the way of this ‘privatisation’ was Elon Musk’s personal vendetta, when it affects the entire world’s future. Big money.

I don't think justice applies to any entity with a market cap above $500 billion. What do you think would happen to the jury and the judge if they did the right thing and acknowledged that OpenAI is a non-profit? Probably got threatened already. It wouldn't be safe for them. At least they're awake now. I bet this is just like crypto sector.

The correct remedy would be to return OpenAI to its former non-profit structure but that's never going to happen in the current system.

The next thing after 'too big to fail' is 'too big to litigate.'

Stealing a non-profit entity is legal if enough people dump billions of dollars in it.

I think a lot about how there's a very plausible alternate history where Elon Musk controls most of the frontier of AI.

I've thought about that, too, but it would require that all of the key individuals at OpenAI would have been willing to stay at OpenAI under his ownership.

That seems unlikely to me given how divisive he is. OpenAI already had one existential leadership crisis without Musk. I doubt it would have fair better under his notoriously difficult leadership. If he had wrestled control away, I would expect an exodus of employees going to new companies.

They're willing to work under the current snake, even got him back after he was removed, so why not musk?

They are both snakes (IMO), but they are different kinds of snakes. I can see why to some Sam is acceptable while Elon wouldn’t be (and vice versa). It’s also convenient to be more lenient toward the snake’s shortcomings when you becoming extremely rich depends on it.

Haven't they hemorrhaged a lot of the founding talent in the years since? Now it is full of ex-Meta ad-tech people trying to find a way to make it actually turn a profit.

The following dates for the start of the statue of limitations were the most plausible:

1. 2019 capped-profit restructuring + 1B MSFT investment

2. 2023 Microsoft expansion / reported 75%-then-49% economics

3. 2024/2025 PBC restructuring

AFAIK it has not been reported as to exactly what the jury found, but IIUC the 2019 date is consistent with their findings.

That's poor for Musk, but it makes sense. He was arguing 2023. I think it is a valid argument.

But he had to know that 2019 was very much in play (and is likely the most logically consistent).

This is very squishy law.

This is what he Grok hopes to become, but probably too late

Fifth place is fine, when the numbers and power in question are that large.

There but for the grace of god go we...

And how much worse things would be if that had come to pass?

why would he run Anthropic?

As I understand it, Anthropic exists in part as a quirk of how Dario Amodei's experience at OpenAI went. In the world where Musk controls OpenAI, I don't think you can assume Anthropic splinters off the same way (for overdetermined reasons! I'm not saying Musk is a better manager.)

Hmm, my understanding is that Dario split over insufficient focus on safety at OpenAI (which, admittedly, could just be the PR-friendly reason) -- something that Elon is also clearly not big on.

Safety not only seems to be an anti-priority at xAI given what we've seen come out of it, even at OpenAI Elon seemed not that concerned with safety, leading to that entertaining incident with a "golden jackass" trophy: https://xcancel.com/abc7newsbayarea/status/20546984193823543...

Almost certainly Dario would still have split from under Elon too, but also very likely that Elon would have immediately thrown a barrage of IP / NDA / trade secret / non-compete violation lawsuits to cripple Anthropic and keep it from reaching the frontier.

You speak as if Elon Musk didn't buy tons of AI chips for full self driving (Dojo) and COMPLETELY flub it.

It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.

Tesla wasn't "successful" before he "took it over" (read: invested most of their seed capital and ran the actual day-to-day operations).

SpaceX, founded entirely by him alone, is also the most valuable space technology company on earth, so...

If you look at initiatives rather than companies most of what Musk has done has been a failure. Boring Company, Hyperloop, Roadster, Semi, full self driving, robotaxis, solar roofs, Optimus, mission around the moon, men on Mars. The list goes on.

Tesla is an incredibly overvalued company rapidly losing ground to China that survives by Musk’s image of being a futurist, and by announcing fake products that never see the light of day.

SpaceX has been headed by Gwynne Shotwell since the early days and usually when Musk inserted himself it’s been a mess.

Well sure. But that's not AI chips or FSD. The subject of this whole topic.

Within this realm of AI, Musk has constantly invested and failed. Dojo, xAI, Grok. His newest idea is leveraging SpaceX money to put data centers in Space.

Good luck with that.

10 years returns S&P 500 (index of all those better than Musk): 261% Tesla: 2700%

Disclaimer: My portfolio is 65% Tesla.

GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius?

Tesla has been a meme stock for about five years now, maybe more. Its valuation correlates with Musk's abilities as a showman and media figure, not a businessman.

I'd argue that Tesla's stock price is more about con artist acumen than business acumen.

TSLA currently has a P/E of ~375. That's extremely overvalued. There's no possible objective reason for TSLA to have such an extreme ratio. Even if you think Robotaxi is going to be a massive success, it would have to completely devour Lyft, Uber, and traditional taxi services all combined to even get half way to justifying that P/E, and considering the already major distrust in Tesla's FSD, I just don't see that happening.

The math doesn't math. People buy TSLA because they want to be part of Elon's cult, not because of anything to do with Tesla as a company.

So you are personally invested in this and openly admit to it. And yet expect me to take a discussion with you seriously?

Normally the way this works, is you excuse yourself away from a debate for being too financially involved in the situation, knowing that your financial bias is too overwhelming.

I absolute abhor the man but I think this is silly. No doubt that he has had luck and help, but he is still a good businessman. He's certainly an asshole (almost certainly dark triad territory), but I think that can be a benefit when creating a business.

It isn't helping him in this fight vs Sam Altman, AI investments or the like.

He lost on a technicality -- filing too late. Does that mean he can file more nuisance lawsuits?

He says he's going to be try. Legally though it'd be hard to go anywhere with this one.

Nine jurors, unanimous, under two hours. The statute of limitations argument wasn't even close.

So you are allowed to violate the law if you aren't sued quickly enough.

Yes. This has always been, and will always be, the case. It's the same in things like copyright law - you can violate any software license if the copyright holder doesn't know you're doing it, or doesn't want to sue you, or doesn't sue you in time. It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.

What Altman and Brockman did still seems highly unethical.

The tech industry largely does not care about ethics.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone.

> It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.

They didn’t do any lobbying? ^_^

They pretty much just broke the law, scaled fast and then their lobbying was "the whole population would hate you if you shut us down now"

Well, you're allowed to violate the contract if you aren't sued quickly enough. You're allowed to violate the law if you aren't prosecuted quickly enough (for some crimes).

I’m sad to learn this news.

I was really hoping they could somehow both lose.

Sigheiling really helped his image. He should definitely try attending more jury trials. It will go great!

PS Bravo to his lawyers. Get his cash folks by promising him that he will win!

Anyone getting emotional in this thread arguing on behalf of either billionaire should have a long hard look in the mirror.

Not sure if I celebrate or not…

Annoying that it had to be Musk to take this fight, but isn't it very unfortunate that OpenAI is allowed to do this non-profit whoopsie we're now a for-profit thing?

Laws were broken?

I believe laws were broken, even though no one contested it with the statute of limitation.

Felon needs mental support

It isn’t fun when billionaires fight — an asshole always ends up winning.

This should clear the path to the IPO and lead to a VERY profitable payday for those holding OpenAI equity. Millionaires and billionaires will be minted ~one year from now.

> A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations.

Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.

A dismissal on technical grounds, which is also a complete loss.

No, it's a complete loss. Much like in engineering, the law considers technical details to be extraordinarily important.

Both should be fined for wasting our time with fake-troll court cases.

Basically the title of the court case was: "Is Skynet slop going to be helpful to mankind".

We all know how that story ends. Thus, fining both is warranted. When the superrich go to court, they should pay an extra fee. Like a billion per court case or so.

Musk may have lost round 1, but Musk has a HUGE pile of cash, and Open AI is a borrower from everybody and their brothers. Almost all the principle people left Open AI already.

That's misunderstanding the finances involved here. OpenAI is a privately held company; sure, that means they're "borrowing" from their investors technically. But that's in exactly the same sense that a public company is actually "owned" by its shareholders. The behavioral relationship goes the other way: people own bits of the company because they want it to do well and their share to grow in size, not because they expect the debt/dividend to be repaid per se.

In point of fact most valuations place OpenAI in the hundreds of billions of dollars already and growing rapidly.

Basically, no: OpenAI's pockets are deeper than Musks's personal wealth. Especially so considering that this suit is existentially important to them where Musk needs to maintain leverage for other efforts.

There won't be a round 2. It's over.

Musk doesn’t seem particularly good at lawsuits. Remember when he was suing Twitter to get out of having to buy them?

Perhaps he lacks good lawyers, perhaps he just can’t find substance and he’s filling out of spite.

Remember Delaware? Where he not only won on appeal but provoked an exodus of companies out of Delaware?

Costs?

Interesting quotes from the discovery emails. - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr/openai-ema...

"At some point we’d get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn’t be on the governance board"

"generally, safety should be a first-class requirement"

"Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit"

"Because we don't have any financial obligations, we can focus on the maximal positive human impact"

"The underlying philosophy of our company [OpenAI] is to disseminate AI technology as broadly as possible as an extension of all individual human wills, ensuring, in the spirit of liberty, that the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated and evolves toward the future desired by the sum of humanity"

"The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the pay is low compared to what others will offer, but we believe the goal and the structure are right"

"do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone's comp by 100-200k per year?"

"The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it."

"it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes)"

"Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn't sound super hard."

"Powerful ideas are produced by top people. Massive clusters help, and are very worth getting, but they play a less important role."

"Deepmind is causing me extreme mental stress."

"At any given time, we will take the action that is likely to most strongly benefit the world."

"Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft's marketing bitch."

"Ok. Let's figure out the least expensive way to ensure compute power is not a constraint..."

"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved . . . In as little as four years, each overnight experiment will feasibly use so much compute capacity that there’s an actual chance of waking up to AGI"

"We think the path must be: AI research non-profit (through end of 2017), AI research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018), Government project (when: ??)"

"Satisfying this means a situation where, regardless of what happens to the three of them, it's guaranteed that power over the company is distributed after the 2-3 year initial period"

"As mentioned, my experience with boards (assuming they consist of good, smart people) is that they are rational and reasonable. There is basically never a real hardcore battle. . ."

"The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you. As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge. . ."

"Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission"

"During this negotiation, we realized that we have allowed the idea of financial return 2-3 years down the line to drive our decisions . . . this attitude is wrong"

"i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!"

". . .apparently in the last day almost everyone has been told that the for-profit structure is not happening and he [Sam] is happy about this"

"Our goal and mission are fundamentally correct"

"We also have identified a small but finite number of limitations in today's deep learning which are barriers to learning from human levels of experience. And we believe we uniquely are on trajectory to solving safety (at least in broad strokes) in the next three years."

"Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity. Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem, rather than the fig leaf you've noted in other institutions. It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies. Related to this, we need to communicate a "better red than dead" outlook — we're trying to build safe AGI, and we're not willing to destroy the world in a down-to-the-wire race to do so."

"The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before."

"This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."

"all investors are clear that they should never expect a profit"

"We saw no alternative to a structure change given the amount of capital we needed and still to preserve a way to 'give the AGI to humanity' other than the capped profit thing, which also lets the board cancel all equity if needed for safety. Fwiw I personally have no equity and never have."

Maybe if musk continues to be shown he’s a wholly immoral person and a net negative for society he’ll get so fed up he’ll take his ball and hop on his space ship and yeet himself onto the surface of mars. One can hope.

Interesting how it played out. Curious will it somehow affect OpenAI business or XAi.

Sam is just too good at this game and as I said before [0] is far worse than Elon and also outsmarted him.

Of course this will be appealed but, as you see the claims just don't stick.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651664

Why do you think Sam is worse than Elon?

Presumably better at being devious. Elon is sloppy...

There's something to be said for the fact that the current crop of plutocrats just show their whole asses.

I’m not a Sam Altman fan, but I think it’s debatable if he’s worse than the guy who did a sieg heil at a political rally

Be more afraid of the technocrat who doesn't even have a tell. It means they are better at manipulation.

Does this also mean we should be more afraid of (leadership) Democrats than Republicans?

He lost his trial. That is just the first phase of a lawsuit.

No, it's effectively over.

>effectively

right, that's my point. not entirely or literally.

Unless you drop it, there is never a case that is over at the trial phase. Anyone reporting on legal matters should know this language matters.

Also: it's not even "effectively" over:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/musk-altman-openai-trial-ver...

Don't know why this was downvoted, Musk is appealing. I'm not expecting people to be civil procedure experts, but it's pretty much high school Government that there are appeals after trials. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/musk-altman-openai-trial-ver...

It really doesn't matter. OpenAI will surely fail under Sam Altman. Just like Sam's other ventures.

Asking for a hundred billion in damages and having your multi-million dollar legal team defeated not on the merits of the case, but because they literally forgot to look at the calendar lol

While none of the billionnaires on the stand came across as stellar paragons of virtue, it's hilarious that even they could not stand Elon.

That said, even though Altman is a shifty dude who's clearly playing a Game of Thrones while all others are playing Capitalism, I am extremely grateful that it's him running OpenAI and not Elon.

Seeing what Elon has done to Twitter, I shudder to think of what he'd do with ChatGPT. The level of reach and subtle influence he would have is insane. He could do with private chats what he's doing to public discourse, and it would all be invisible.

On the other hand, seeing what he's done with Grok, it's very likely OpenAI would be where xAI is and would never reach this level of adoption and influence. Which seems to be what most people at OpenAI were really worried about.

This should have been thrown away from the start, not sure why it saw a day in court. Musk himsrlf created xAi that is for profit. If he really is concerned about ai his own actions do not show that. This is just regret that he lost control of OpenAI, a trillion dollar company, and nothing more.

Advice for Elon: you can actually use ChatGPT on the web or the desktop app to schedule reminders for you, like "file lawsuit against OpenAI."

The consequences of relying on grok..

Did you not read the article at all? He had to do this in 2021, well before such GPT apps existed.

That's not what the article stated. The jury had to find that the harms occurred prior to certain dates in 2021, not that Musk had to file before then.

Ending a trial over a bureaucratic technicality is not good justice.

Statute of limitations is not a "bureaucratic technicality", it is the law.

Can some lawyer explain the rationale of statute of limitations? Like why does a robber get to get away with the crime if they are able to evade the police for x number of years. Is it just because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything?

I recognize the value of the statute of limitations, but it is a technicality, and unfortunately, the central legal questions of this case were not addressed.

I am absolutely certain that if Sam was suing xAI and the case got dismissed on a technicality people would be lined up with screeds about the injustice of the situation.

It can be both

Then why did the American justice system needed nine jurors when a clerk could have sufficed?

The American judicial system is completely Byzantine and rotten, from top to bottom. Worse than many third world countries.

If you consider a statute of limitations to be a mere bureaucratic technicality, then you might as well say we shouldn't have the entire Anglo-American legal system.

Moreover, there is no "justice" here either way--it's just rich people suing each other.

The jury found against Musk - what exactly are you talking about?

Like any case involving legal matters, they are talking about things they deeply do not understand.

It turns out 'stealing a charity' is strictly defined in California law as 'commercializing it with Microsoft instead of my car company.' Glad we finally got that clarified

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