Closing arguments set the stage for jurors in the trial pitting Elon Musk against OpenAI and its leadership over OpenAI’s nonprofit origins, with the outcome potentially affecting both the company’s future and competition in frontier artificial intelligence. The trial’s final arguments were heard Thursday in Oakland, California, where lawyers for both sides presented their last cases to the jury before deliberations. The dispute centers on claims that OpenAI’s founders and executives betrayed plans to keep the company’s mission in a nonprofit structure and instead shifted toward a moneymaking mode.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before later leaving, filed the lawsuit in 2024 accusing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Altman’s top deputy of betraying that charitable plan. The trial’s potential reach extends beyond the parties, as the companies are among the best-known players racing to develop increasingly capable AI systems and are moving toward major initial public offerings.
A key threshold issue for jurors is timing. One of the jury’s tasks is to determine whether Musk filed his lawsuit on time, because a relatively short timeline constrains the claims he is making that depend on breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment. OpenAI argued that Musk waited too long and cannot seek harms that occurred before August 2021.
In a court filing last month, the judge said that if jurors find Musk failed to file within the statute of limitations, it is “highly likely” the judge will accept that finding and direct a verdict for the defendants. If the jury decides the lawsuit was filed in time, the panel then moves to the substance of Musk’s claims about how OpenAI operated. Jurors would have to decide whether OpenAI had a “charitable trust” and whether it was broken by OpenAI and its executives, and jurors would also have to assess the unjust-enrichment claim that names Altman and Greg Brockman, co-founder and president, along with OpenAI.
Microsoft is also in the mix. As a co-defendant, it is tied to Musk’s theory that the company aided and abetted any breach of a charitable trust. The trial record described Musk’s early involvement and Microsoft’s later investment relationship, including that Musk invested $38 million in OpenAI during its first years and that Microsoft became OpenAI’s biggest investor after Musk’s departure.
Musk’s attorney, Steven Molo, delivered the closing arguments Thursday, with Altman and Brockman in the courtroom while Musk was in China with President Donald Trump and other prominent tech executives. Molo told jurors Musk was “sorry he could not be here,” and in his closing he emphasized questions about Altman’s credibility. Molo doubled down on testimony he said undermined Altman’s trustworthiness, including references to witnesses who called the OpenAI CEO a “liar” under oath.
Molo said in his summation that “I confronted Sam Altman with the fact that five witnesses in this trial, all people that he’s known for years and worked with, called him a liar under oath. Liar’s a very powerful word in a courtroom,” according to the closing statement as reported. He described those five people as Musk and another co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, as well as OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, Mira Murati, and two ex-board members, Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley.
Molo also argued that the case depended on whether jurors believed Altman because Altman was the defendants’ “main witness.” He said, “Sam Altman’s credibility is directly at issue in this case. He’s the defendants’ main witness. The defendants absolutely need you to believe Sam Altman. If you cannot trust him, if you don’t believe him, they cannot win. It’s that simple.” With no signed contract on the alleged charitable trust, Musk’s side presented email and other communication between Musk and OpenAI leaders, along with materials from OpenAI’s website and press interviews, as evidence meant to show the existence of such a trust.
The trial also included a dispute about money sought in the case. In a brief exchange with jurors out of the room, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers criticized Molo for suggesting in Thursday’s presentation that Musk was not seeking any money. The report said that while Musk had abandoned a bid for damages for himself before the trial, the lawsuit still seeks an unspecified amount of money to fund altruistic efforts of OpenAI’s charitable arm.
The judge said Musk was seeking “billions of dollars of disgorgement,” and she ordered Molo to either retract his statement or “drop your claim for billions of dollars.” The parties later agreed that the judge would correct the statement to jurors, according to the report.
OpenAI’s attorney Sarah Eddy made the case that Musk’s evidence did not support his allegations about the company’s nonprofit origins. Eddy said Musk misrepresented details surrounding OpenAI’s nonprofit founding and Musk’s subsequent falling out with other co-founders. “Mr. Molo says that Sam Altman can’t be trusted,” Eddy said, adding, “Mr. Musk is the one whose testimony is contradicted by every other witness.”
Eddy also argued that Musk knew of and supported plans for OpenAI to form a for-profit company that would still support its mission to benefit humanity. She told jurors that “Mr. Musk, he has tried to persuade you that his years-ago donations to OpenAI came with specific strings attached, that these strings were strong enough to last forever to tie OpenAI up in knots as it tries to pursue its mission, and that these strings gave Mr. Musk perpetual rights over OpenAI,” and she said, “But Mr. Musk has come nowhere close to making that case.”
Eddy brought in testimony about Musk discussing his children inheriting control of OpenAI, and said “He wanted dominion over AGI,” referring to artificial general intelligence. Eddy said, “That’s why this was such a high stakes conversation. Mr. Musk wanted total control. Maybe, maybe he’d give it up over time, or maybe not. But it was up to him and that was the problem.”
Outside the courthouse, protesters confronted both sides of the dispute. More than a dozen demonstrators bashed both parties as billionaires who said they were eroding the environment, the workforce and people’s mental health, and who protesters said would wipe out humanity. Signs included “Stop replacing healthcare workers with chatboxes!” and “No future for workers in Musk-Altman fascist world.”
Demonstrators also connected the trial to broader policy and wage issues. Saru Jayaraman, who is part of a campaign to push a $30 hourly wage on election ballots this fall, said, “The thing is, we’re all losing, that’s the main point. Who’s really winning? The two of them,” referring to Altman and Musk. Phoebe Thomas Sorgen, a peace activist from nearby Berkeley, said there needs to be a global ban on artificial intelligence, and argued that both sides in the trial were hypocritical, using language reported as criticizing the incentives behind their AI work.
Janie Har contributed to the story, and O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.