Court dismisses Elon Musk's case against Sam Altman and OpenAI
A jury on Monday found that Elon Musk waited too long to bring claims accusing OpenAI, under Sam Altman’s leadership, of abandoning its public-benefit mission as it moved toward a for-profit structure.
The nine-person advisory jury determined that the claims against OpenAI and Altman were barred due to the statute of limitations. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the determination and dismissed the claims.
The three-week trial at a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, featured testimony from Musk and Altman, as well as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
When Musk sued OpenAI and Altman two years ago, he claimed that the company abandoned its mission of benefiting humanity.
Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, said he reached an agreement with the company's leaders on the nonprofit course of the firm when it launched in 2015.
Musk accused the company of later breaching agreement when it made ChatGPT-4 available for use by Microsoft -- meaning the tech giant got access to the then-most powerful version of its popular chatbot under an exclusive licensing agreement. Microsoft and OpenAI have renegotiated the exclusive licensing agreement, allowing OpenAI to strike deals with other tech firms.
OpenAI rebuked the charges, calling them "baseless." Microsoft also denied any wrongdoing. Musk, the world's richest person, counts $803 billion in wealth, according to Forbes. He was seeking $150 billion in damages from the tech companies, as well as the removal of Altman from OpenAI's board of directors.
Musk also sought a legal order that requires OpenAI to abide by its alleged founding mission of aiding humanity and retaining its nonprofit form
OpenAI, which is not publicly traded, valued itself at $852 billion after a round of funding in March. Microsoft's value -- as measured by market capitalization -- stands at about $3.1 trillion.
Musk pleaded two claims against OpenAI: unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust.
Lawyers for Altman argued that Musk was motivated by a pursuit of control over OpenAI, rather than an effort to safeguard its non-profit status. In fact, Musk sought to fold OpenAI into Tesla -- a move that would have absorbed the venture into a for-profit entity, lawyers for Altman said in a legal filing.
In 2018, Musk told a former OpenAI employee that financial support from Tesla would help OpenAI compete with tech giant Google, the filing said.
"Tesla [was] the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google," Musk said, according to the legal filing.
For his part, Musk said in the lawsuit that the agreement on OpenAI's non-profit status was memorialized in a legal filing when OpenAI was incorporated.
In the lawsuit, Musk alleged that Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman reaffirmed the founding agreement in written messages over the ensuing years.
"[I] remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!" Altman wrote to Musk in 2017, according to the lawsuit.
Musk, who helped bankroll OpenAI, launched a rival for-profit AI company in 2023 called xAI, which built a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT.
Acknowledging his previous criticism of the pace and ambitions of AI development, Musk said in a conference call on X in July 2023 that he entered the industry reluctantly.
