Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

Image Credits:Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg / Getty Images10:34 AM PDT · May 18, 2026Elon Musk’s claim that he was mistreated by his OpenAI cofounders failed after nine California jurors decided in a unanimous verdict that his lawsuits had been filed too late.Musk took Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI and Microsoft to of “stealing a charity” by creating a for-profit affiliate to the frontier AI lab. Jurors, however, found that any harms that Musk suffered came before the deadline for filing his claims under the law.While the trial delved deeply into the melodramatic history of OpenAI and featured testimony from leading figures in Silicon Valley, it ultimately turned on fairly narrow questions of the law. The trial focused on whether and when Altman and the other defendants had made and broken promises to Musk, but the examination failed to convince jurors that he had a valid claim. “There was a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss it on the spot,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said after the verdict was delivered.The end of the case means that one major threat to OpenAI—a potential restructuring—is now off the table ahead of its reported IPO.This is a developing story and will be updated.TopicsWhen you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C.

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