OpenAI Trial Verdict: Elon Musk 0, Sam Altman 1 As Jury Rejects Tesla Boss’ $150B Suit; As Tech Company Preps IPO, Musk Promises Appeal

OpenAI‘s march towards an estimated $1 trillion IPO picked up pace today with a California jury today unanimously rejecting Elon Musk‘s $150 billion lawsuit over the direction of OpenAI.

Accusing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of “stealing a charity” and “unjustly enriching” himself by shifting the tech powerhouse to a for-profit company, Musk’s 2024 filed action was kneecapped by the nine-jurors for the world’s richest man taking way too long to launch his legal objection.

Despite all the big names, big money and big Artificial Intelligence ideas at play in federal court in Oakland the past month, it was a look at the calendar put the whole thing to rest.  Musk, Altman and OpenAI co-founder Brockman first started talking about shifting the company to a profit entity in 2017, two years after OpenAI was formed. Two years later, after Musk had exited, OpenAI put up a for-profit portion of the company. There is a three year limit on violation of a duty of charitable trust claim There is a two year limitation on claims that the principals unlawfully enriched themselves.

To that, the merits of Musk’s arguments, the technology at play and whether or not he had a point or was simply sour grapes in seeking to defang a competitor that he co-founded were never addressed. Termed a legal technicality or not, the statute of limitations on such objections as Musk had and it took the jury less than two hours this morning to shut this all down.

Casting those statute of time limitations issues aside for now, Musk’s main attorney Marc Toberoff (Yes, that long thorn in various studios copyright paws) voiced his reaction to the verdict and Judge Gonzalez Rogers: “Appeal.”

Outside the Ronald V. Dellums U.S. Courthouse, OpenAI lawyer Bill Savitt, told the cameras he was glad the jury agreed “Mr. Musk’s lawsuit is nothing more than an after-the-fact contrivance that bears no relationship to reality.”

Slamming the X owner for being “hypocritical,” and swatting away any promised appeal, Savitt added: mr. Musk can bring his claims, and he can tell his stories, but what the nine members of this jury found is that his stories were just that, stories, not facts. And the facts are that Open AI is a not-for-profit, mission-driven organization that has been and will continue to be faithful to that mission as it already has done.

While both Musk and Altman testified in the three-week trial in Oakland, CA, neither of the techoverlords were in court in the Bay Area when the verdict and the judge’s decision were rendered.

Musk sunk nearly $50 million into the 2015 forming of OpenAI to block what was then Google’s widely perceived AI dominance. He left under a cloud in 2018 and has been working on AI platforms of his own ever since, as well as inking a data center and supercomputer deal with rising AI star Anthropic. Aiming to pink slip Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Musk’s suit also wanted an injunction to halt OpenAI’s lucrative licensing deal with Microsoft.

Antitrust claims against OpenAI and partner Microsoft are still alive in the case, and were supposed to be spotlighted in a second stage of the trial. How that occurs or if it does will be determined this week, but based on past comments by Judge Rogers and the sheer number of AI companies that exist today, it seems unlikely.

Microsoft was also a defendant in the case, and now find themselves free and clear of Musk — for now. Monday, after the verdict, the Washington state-based giant said: “The facts and the timeline in this case have long been clear and we welcome the jury’s the decision to dismiss these claims as untimely. We remain committed to our work with OpenAI to scale AI for people and organizations around the world.”

Of course, Musk being his litigious and acerbic self, you know there’s more to come — whether the intelligence is artificial or not.