Five takeaways from the blockbuster trial that pitted Elon Musk against OpenAI

ByTech Word News

On Monday morning, a nine-member jury unanimously dismissed Elon Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against artificial intelligence startup OpenAI.

After less than two hours of deliberations, the jurors ruled that Mr. Musk had not filed the lawsuit within the statutory time limit. A judge then dismissed the tech mogul’s lawsuit against OpenAI, which he helped found as a nonprofit in 2015.

After Mr. Musk left the AI ​​research lab in 2018, his lawsuit alleged that OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, and its president, Greg Brockman, abandoned the nonprofit’s mission by putting profits above the public good. The year Mr. Musk left, Mr. Altman attached a commercial company to the nonprofit and began raising billions of dollars from investors such as Microsoft. OpenAI is now valued at $730 billion and is expected to have an initial public offering, possibly as early as this year.

But all the jury really decided was that Mr. Musk waited too long to file suit. His claims remained on the table.

In addition to an important lesson on the dangers of procrastination, here are five takeaways from the three-week process.

After the jury’s verdict, Mr. Musk’s lawyers said he intended to appeal.

Mr. Musk has long argued, both in and out of court, that OpenAI has jeopardized the future of humanity by abandoning its non-profit mission. And his complaints about Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman are deeply personal.

Two days before the trial began, Mr. Musk sent Mr. Brockman a text message asking if he was interested in settling the case. When Mr. Brockman suggested that both sides drop their claims, Mr. Musk responded with a text attacking Mr. Brockman and Mr. Altman.

“By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America,” he wrote, according to a document submitted at trial. “If you insist, so be it.”

When Mr. Musk filed the suit, many legal experts questioned its merits, and many doubted it would go to trial.

“I was surprised we got there,” said Dorothy Lund, a Columbia University law professor who specializes in corporate law. She said the case would not go to court in Delaware (where OpenAI was incorporated), which typically takes a stricter approach to corporate law.

The jury’s decision on Monday also indicated that Mr. Musk faces a major issue with the statute of limitations, which was three years in that case. He began publicly complaining about OpenAI’s behavior as early as 2020, but did not sue until 2024.

Evidence presented in the trial showed that Mr Musk wanted to build OpenAI into his Tesla electric car company in 2017 and 2018. At the time, he also burned an important researcher from OpenAI, hoping to poach others.

This could undermine his appeal against the verdict. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that Mr. Musk was complaining about turning OpenAI into a profit, even though he wanted to do the same thing back in 2017.

But his efforts to merge Tesla and OpenAI also show his enormous ambitions in AI. While he has complained that OpenAI has created a dangerous race with AI, he is very eager to be part of that race — and has been for a long time.

He recently folded xAI, his artificial intelligence startup, into SpaceX, his rocket ship company. SpaceX is preparing its own initial public offering on Wall Street, which could value the company at $1.5 trillion.

Two weeks before the trial began, The New Yorker published a 16,000-word article under the headline “Sam Altman May Control Our Future – Can He Be Trusted?” And once the trial was underway, Mr. Musk’s lawyers spent three weeks trying to undermine Mr. Altman’s credibility.

When Mr. Altman was on the stand, Steve Molo, Mr. Musk’s chief lawyer, repeatedly questioned whether he was credible. “Are you a person who just tells people the things they want to hear, whether those things are true or not?” Mr. Molo asked Mr. Altman.

During closing arguments, Mr. Molo attacked Mr. Altman with a sweeping metaphor.

“Imagine you’re hiking and you come across one of those wooden bridges you see on the trail and it’s over a ravine,” Mr. Molo told the judges. “There’s a river that’s 100 feet below and it looks a little scary, but a woman standing at the entrance to the bridge says, ‘Don’t worry, the bridge is built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth.’ Would you walk over that bridge? I don’t think many people would.”

Mr. Musk’s suit did not pass with a jury, but given the trial’s enormous media attention, it managed to raise questions about Mr. Altman’s character.

If Mr. Musk’s suit succeeds, it would deal a serious blow to OpenAI.

He sought $150 billion in damages and wanted Mr. Altman fired from OpenAI’s board. He also wanted OpenAI to take the step it did to become a profitable company before its initial public offering.

This may have shifted the course of the AI ​​race. Now, however, OpenAI can push forward in this race as it challenges a number of other formidable competitors, including Anthropic, Google and Meta.