A federal court on Monday dismissed claims filed against OpenAI and its top executives by Elon Musk, who accused them of betraying a shared vision for it to guide artificial intelligence’s development as a nonprofit dedicated to humanity’s benefit.
Musk, the world’s richest man, was a co-founder of OpenAI, the company that launched in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT. After investing $38 million in its first years, Musk accused OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his top deputy of shifting into a moneymaking mode behind his back.
The nine-person jury found that Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit and missed the deadline for the statute of limitations.
The jury served in an advisory role, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the verdict Monday as the court’s own and dismissed Musk’s claims. The jury deliberated only two hours before returning its verdict.
The trial that began April 27 in Oakland, California shed light on the bitter falling-out between the two Silicon Valley titans and the beginnings of OpenAI, now a company valued at $852 billion and moving toward potentially one of the largest initial public offerings in history.
Altman and OpenAI claimed there was never a promise to keep OpenAI a nonprofit forever. In fact, they argued, Musk knew this and filed his lawsuit because he couldn’t have unilateral control over the fast-growing AI developer.
Musk was seeking damages to be paid to the altruistic efforts of OpenAI’s charitable arm as well as Altman’s ouster from OpenAI’s board. Musk’s decision to stop funding the company contributed to a bitter rift between the former allies. Musk says he was responding to deceptive conduct that OpenAI’s board picked up on when it fired Altman as CEO in 2023 before he got his job back days later.
The three-week trial saw testimony from Musk, Altman and his top lieutenant Greg Brockman, along with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and a slew of others in the tech titans’ orbit. Musk told jurors on his first of three days on the stand that, fundamentally, “I think they’re going to try to make this lawsuit ... very complicated, but it’s actually very simple,” Musk said. “Which is that it’s not OK to steal a charity.”
Musk’s lawsuit claimed that, in addition to “breach of charitable trust,” Altman and Brockman unjustly enriched themselves from the windfall as the ChatGPT maker soared in valuation. Brockman revealed during the trial that his stake in OpenAI is worth about $30 billion.
OpenAI has brushed off Musk’s allegations as an unfounded case of sour grapes aimed at undercutting its rapid growth and bolstering Musk’s own xAI, which he launched in 2023 as a competitor. During cross-examination, Musk was sometimes combative with OpenAI lawyer William Savitt.
“Your questions are not simple,” Musk said at one point. “They are designed to trick me essentially.”
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In considering statute of limitations it depends on when "the clock starts ticking". Without having looked into the case at all, I'm assuming that was the basis of the lawsuit. Musk trying to say the clock didn't start until later, or possibly should have been paused at some point. The jury ruled that was wrong.
Again, no knowledge on this case in particular, but that's what I'd assume.
From what I was able to gather, this entire lawsuit was a tangled spaghetti mass of bullshit from the start, and a lot of what the jury had to do was sort through the spaghetti bullshit and find out exactly what were the legal claims at issue and to figure out how to rule on them with the judge (the jury was just an advisory panel for the judge, and the judge said they would take advice from the jury on how to rule). Once that was done, the jury figured out the statute of limitations had passed anyway, so it didn’t even fucking matter.
It feels like such a waste of time and money to have spent so much time figuring out the answer to the statute question while having the whole trial. If they simply could have short circuited the proceedings and only focused on this to start, got an answer to this, and then continued if necessary it would have been so much easier on everyone. It doesn't take 11 days to answer this question.
Lol! Wait till you learn about how the rest of society works!
I mean, yeah, but I think the whole point of this trial in the first place was for musk and Altman to publicly slap-fight about this in court. they're both so rich, that whatever money either would have won or lost over this could hardly have ever mattered. it was about the public bitchery of it, and to hell with everyone else's wasted time/
fuck both of these shitstains