Musk v Altman/OpenAI trial begins
Musk sought as much as $134bn in damages to be paid to OpenAI's charity, plus Altman's removal from the board, in a case tried before a nine-member advisory jury in Oakland.
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Jury selection began in Musk v. Altman, the federal trial of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI and Microsoft, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California. Musk’s testimony opened the following day. The case, filed in February 2024, centred on OpenAI’s 2019 shift from a pure nonprofit structure toward a capped-profit subsidiary and the 2025 conversion into a public-benefit corporation, which Musk argued betrayed commitments made when he helped fund the organisation’s founding in 2015.
Musk’s surviving claims — after the court had earlier dismissed related counts of false advertising and breach of fiduciary duty — alleged breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment, framing OpenAI’s founding pledges as an enforceable trust rather than ordinary corporate promises. He had amended the suit to ask that any monetary award, reported at up to $134 billion, go to OpenAI’s nonprofit rather than to him personally, alongside Altman’s removal from OpenAI’s board. A nine-member jury sat in an advisory capacity: under the structure of the trust claims, its verdict would guide but not bind Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who retained the final ruling. Expected witnesses included Altman, Brockman, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, former OpenAI executive Mira Murati and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella.
OpenAI’s defence, previewed before trial, was that Musk had known and endorsed the need for a for-profit structure to raise the capital frontier AI development required, and at one point sought to lead such an entity himself; a spokesperson called the suit “a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor.” Coverage noted the stakes extended beyond the two men: a verdict for Musk could have forced changes to OpenAI’s structure or governance ahead of an anticipated public offering, at a company then valued above $850 billion, and OpenAI had cited the litigation as a disclosed business risk. The trial concluded with a jury verdict on 18 May 2026.