A federal jury today voted to dismiss Elon Musk’s high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI Group PBC.
The nine jurors found that the complaint, which Musk filed in 2024, was brought after the statute of limitations had expired. The nonbinding advisory decision was immediately accepted by the judge presiding over the case.
Musk originally brought the lawsuit in March 2024 and refiled it with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (pictured) a few months later. The complaint revolved around a $38 million donation he had made to OpenAI at the time of its 2015 launch. According to the lawsuit, the ChatGPT developer breached a set of understandings that its leadership team reached with Musk.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab. According to Musk, the artificial intelligence provider pledged to continue operating as a nonprofit but broke the promise when it launched a for-profit arm in 2019. Furthermore, the complaint accused OpenAI of breaching a commitment to open-source its large language models.
The lawsuit referred to the commitments allegedly made by the AI developer as a “founding agreement.” OpenAI, for its part, argued that there was no formal founding agreement and that it spent Musk’s $38 million donation properly.
The trial began on April 28. During the hearing, attorneys for OpenAI told the jury that Musk’s lawsuit was an attempt to harm a rival. Musk launched a competing AI startup called xAI a few months before filing the complaint and folded it into SpaceX Corp. this past February. Both SpaceX and OpenAI are reportedly seeking to go public by year’s end.
The ChatGPT developer can list its shares because it restructured its for-profit arm, the focus of the lawsuit, as a public benefit corporation in 2025. Musk asked the court to undo the reorganization. In addition, the lawsuit called for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman to be dismissed from their roles.
The complaint named Microsoft Corp. as a plaintiff alongside the ChatGPT developer. Musk accused the tech giant of aiding and abetting OpenAI’s effort to breach the founding agreement it had allegedly pledged to uphold. According to CNBC, Musk sought a court order that would have forced OpenAI and Microsoft to give up to $180 billion in “ill-gotten gains.”
The trial lasted about three weeks. The jurors reached their decision today after less than two hours of deliberation. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stated in the courtroom that “I think there’s a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss on the spot.”
In a post on X, Musk called the verdict a “calendar technicality” and pledged to appeal. OpenAI and Microsoft welcomed the decision.
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