Reporters and lawyers line up outside the federal courthouse in Oakland for jury selection. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
A jury ruled unanimously Monday that Elon Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Microsoft, finding the defendants not liable on all claims after less than two hours of deliberation.
The nine-person jury found Altman, co-founder Greg Brockman, and OpenAI not liable on the breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment claims. On the same statute-of-limitations grounds, the jury rejected Musk’s claim that Microsoft aided and abetted a breach of OpenAI’s charitable trust.
The verdict, reached on the first morning of deliberations, caps a three-week trial in federal court in Oakland that drew testimony from some of the most prominent figures in the tech industry and threatened to reshape the AI landscape.
Steven Molo, a lawyer for Musk, reportedly said in court that he was preserving the right to appeal but had not yet decided how to proceed.
Microsoft’s statement: “The facts and the timeline in this case have long been clear, and we welcome the jury’s decision to dismiss these claims as untimely. We remain committed to our work with OpenAI to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world.”
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to the safe development of artificial intelligence, contributing an estimated $38 million before leaving the board in 2018.
He filed suit in 2024, claiming Altman, Brockman, and others had transformed OpenAI into a for-profit venture, betraying the mission he helped fund. Microsoft, which has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, was later added as a defendant.
The three claims that went to trial are breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment against OpenAI, Altman, and Brockman, and aiding and abetting breach of charitable trust against Microsoft. The nine-person jury’s verdict is advisory; U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will make the final determination on liability.
The trial ran for three weeks in federal court in Oakland, with testimony from Musk, Altman, Brockman, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, among many other witnesses called by the parties in the case.
Internal emails, text messages, and deposition transcripts revealed the inner workings of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, including Nadella and other Microsoft executives weighing in on the composition of OpenAI’s board during the crisis that briefly ousted Altman as CEO in November 2023.
A central exhibit for Musk’s case was a March 2018 email in which Scott questioned whether OpenAI’s donors knew about its commercial plans, writing that he couldn’t imagine they had funded an open effort “so that they could then go build a closed, for profit thing on its back.” Microsoft went on to invest billions anyway.
Scott testified that he wrote the email as a skeptic evaluating the deal, not raising an alarm about its mission — and that he had donor Reid Hoffman, not Musk, in mind.
In closing arguments, Microsoft’s attorney Russell Cohen of Dechert told jurors the email showed only that “Microsoft took time to get answers to those questions before entering a risky and important partnership.”
A key defense argument across both closing days centered on a September 24, 2020 tweet in which Musk wrote that OpenAI had come to “seem like the opposite of open” and appeared “essentially captured by Microsoft.”
Cohen argued the post proved Musk believed his alleged promises were broken years before he filed suit — potentially putting his claims outside the three-year statute of limitations. He closed his argument by urging jurors to find the claims time-barred.
“We just ask you to remember one thing, the tweet,” Cohen said, asking them to find that the statute of limitations prevents Musk from making the claims against Microsoft.
On the opening day of trial, Microsoft and OpenAI announced an amended partnership, making Microsoft’s IP license non-exclusive, freeing OpenAI to serve products on any cloud provider, and ending Microsoft’s revenue-share payments to OpenAI. Amazon moved the next day to bring OpenAI’s models to its cloud platform.
Musk has asked the judge to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles at OpenAI, unwind the company’s 2025 conversion to a for-profit public benefit corporation, and return what he calls wrongful gains to the OpenAI nonprofit.
His damages expert initially put the combined figure as high as $134 billion. The judge questioned those numbers, and the remedies phase is being heard separately.
