OpenAI‘s march towards an estimated $1 trillion IPO picked up pace Monday when a California jury unanimously rejected Elon Musk‘s $150 billion lawsuit over the direction of the AI giant.

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, finding the world’s richest man took way too long to launch his legal objection.

Once federal judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed and ruled accordingly, Musk was done like digital dinner.

Despite all the big names, big money and big AI ideas at play in court in Oakland over the past month, it was a look at the calendar that put the whole thing to rest. Musk, Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman first started talking about shifting the company to a for-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.

While there’s a tendency to hang this all on being a technicality, it is far from that in the framework of American law. There is a three-year limit on violation of a duty of charitable trust claim. Torching Musk’s other big allegation, 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 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, 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 and deep thorn in various studios’ copyright paws) voiced his reaction to the verdict and Judge Rogers: “Appeal.”

Outside the Ronald V. Dellums U.S. Courthouse, even as other lawsuits between the parties continue, OpenAI lawyer Bill Savitt told the cameras he was glad the jury agreed with his POV that “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 OpenAI 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 tech overlords were in court when the verdict and the judge’s decision were rendered.

Of course, with Musk now an immediate non-issue for OpenAI, Altman may be showing up big time soon on Wall Street with a long-planned IPO dropping.

Not making any real money but overstuffed with investors (like a nearly 30% ownership stake by Microsoft), OpenAI is valued as of today at $500 billion. Put another way, the home of ChatGPT hovers up over 80% of the start-up cash in the AI space.

In that windfall context, talking to banks and more for months about an expected public offering, OpenAI is now on the launch pad for what could be a $1 trillion IPO, the largest in the New York Stock Exchange’s history.

Musk sunk nearly $50 million into the forming of OpenAI in 2015 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 Brockman, Musk’s suit also wanted an injunction to halt OpenAI’s lucrative licensing deal with Microsoft.

Antitrust claims against OpenAI and Microsoft are still alive in the case, and were supposed to be spotlighted in a second stage of the trial. How that occurs or whether it does will be determined this week, but based on past comments by 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 itself free and clear of Musk — for now. On 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.