About 90 minutes. That is how long it took nine jurors in an Oakland, California, federal courtroom to dismiss the most expensive grievance in Silicon Valley history.

On Monday, a unanimous jury found that Elon Musk waited too long to sue OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman over allegations they “stole a charity” — his phrase for the company’s shift from nonprofit research lab to one of the world’s most valuable tech companies. The statute of limitations had expired. Case closed.

The verdict arrived so quickly that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers was still listening to expert testimony about potential damages when the jury signaled it was ready. One moment, the court was weighing how much Musk might be owed — his expert had pegged the figure between $78.8 billion and $135 billion. The next, the number was moot.

“There was a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss on the spot,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers said after the verdict, confirming she would accept the jury’s advisory findings as her own.

A Trial That Had Everything Except a Close Question of Law

The proceeding had all the ingredients of a Silicon Valley spectacle. Testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Musk’s former romantic partner Shivon Zilis — also a Neuralink executive and mother of four of his children — taking the stand. Hundreds of pages of private emails, text messages, and internal meeting notes were submitted as evidence, including Brockman’s personal diaries and texts between Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing possibly buying OpenAI together. Musk himself told the court: “I was a fool. I gave them free funding to create a startup.”

But for all the melodrama, the case turned on a dry legal question: when did Musk know? OpenAI’s lawyers argued he was aware of the behavior described in his lawsuit as early as 2021. The jury agreed. Since Musk did not file until February 2024, his claims were time-barred — dead on arrival regardless of their underlying merit.

The jurors never reached the substance of Musk’s allegations that Altman and Brockman perverted OpenAI’s mission by building a for-profit arm and partnering with Microsoft. They didn’t have to.

The Competitor Problem

OpenAI’s attorneys never disputed that the company’s structure had changed. Instead, they reframed the lawsuit as a competitive maneuver. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after failing to gain control of it, according to evidence presented at trial. He launched his own AI company, xAI — since renamed SpaceXAI and folded into his rocket company — in 2023. The lawsuit followed in early 2024.

“The finding of the jury confirms that what this lawsuit was was a hypocritical attempt to sabotage a competitor,” said William Savitt, OpenAI’s lead attorney, after the verdict.

That framing proved effective. Musk had donated roughly $38 million to OpenAI in its early years, and his lawyers argued those contributions came with an implicit commitment that the organization would remain a nonprofit. But OpenAI presented evidence that Musk himself had pushed for a for-profit structure to compete with Google, and had sought to control it. The jury saw a man who wanted the wheel only when someone else was driving.

What Comes Next

Musk’s lead counsel, Marc Toberoff, told reporters: “One word: Appeal.”

The judge will now enter a final judgment, and the appeals process could stretch on. But the practical consequences are immediate. The verdict removes one of the last legal obstacles to OpenAI’s reported plans for an IPO — a public offering that had been shadowed by the possibility that a court could unwind the company’s corporate restructuring or force the removal of its leadership.

Microsoft, named as a codefendant for its investments in OpenAI, was also cleared. A spokesperson said the company “remained committed to our work with OpenAI to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world.”

For Altman, the verdict is a clean slate of sorts — the world’s richest man took his best shot at OpenAI’s legitimacy and missed, not because of a technicality, but because he sat on his hands. Musk built a mythology around this case: the idealist defrauded by the operator. Nine jurors needed about 90 minutes to decide the story didn’t hold.

Sources