⏰ Musk's OpenAI suit dismissed: the jury faulted his timing

In December 2015, OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, with Elon Musk and Sam Altman as co-chairs, the company said in its launch announcement. Its backers committed $1 billion in total. A decade later, Musk sued to undo what it had become.

The pledge

The $1 billion never fully materialized. TechCrunch's analysis of tax filings found OpenAI's nonprofit had collected just $133 million in total from its inception through 2021. OpenAI has said Musk invested less than $45 million; Musk, in a 2023 CNBC interview, put his own contribution "on the order of $50 million." The two figures have never been reconciled.

The resignation

Musk left OpenAI's board in February 2018, in a move OpenAI said would avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla's autonomous-driving work; its blog post said the departure would "eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon." He stayed on as a donor and adviser. He did not keep a seat.

The filing

In April 2026, Musk amended his existing lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, asking the court to unwind the restructuring outright - the move that, the previous October, had converted OpenAI's for-profit arm into OpenAI Group PBC, with the nonprofit, renamed the OpenAI Foundation, holding a 26% stake.

The verdict

He lost. On May 18, 2026, a federal jury in Oakland, California found Musk had waited past the three-year statute of limitations before suing over the restructuring, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers adopted the verdict. The timeline settled the lawsuit; it did not settle whether converting a nonprofit built to ensure AGI "benefits all of humanity" into an $850-billion-plus company broke that promise.

What it became

The company Musk tried to unwind kept growing. In late March 2026, weeks before the verdict, OpenAI raised $122 billion at a valuation of over $850 billion, CNBC reported.