After a court fight that ended on a procedural timeline issue, neither Elon Musk nor OpenAI fully escaped reputational damage from the landmark trial in Oakland, California, the Associated Press reported. The federal jury found that Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit, turning what both sides had presented as a fight over OpenAI’s leadership and origins into a decision that hinged on a statutory deadline.
OpenAI’s position after the verdict was that it avoided what it faced as a potentially costly loss. The company, valued by AP as worth $852 billion, said it remained on track for an initial public offering that could rank among the largest such offerings in history, according to the wire report. Musk, meanwhile, said he would appeal and argued that the trial judge had created a bad precedent.
Musk had sued seeking the ouster of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and one of the company’s co-founders, along with other changes, AP said. In response to the lawsuit, the trial also placed Altman and other OpenAI leaders at the center of competing narratives about what the parties owed each other and what it meant for OpenAI to pursue its original mission.
The courtroom clash included accusations that OpenAI, Altman and its top lieutenant Greg Brockman had betrayed a shared vision for OpenAI to remain a nonprofit focused on guiding artificial intelligence development for the good of humanity. AP reported that Altman countered by accusing Musk of trying to hobble OpenAI for the benefit of Musk’s own AI company. The jury’s verdict returned quickly—after less than two hours of deliberation—despite a three-week trial described as drawing on hundreds of pieces of evidence and featuring some of the technology sector’s biggest names.
Musk’s critique of the outcome focused on the judge and what he called the trial’s underlying posture. AP reported that Musk called Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers a “terrible activist Oakland judge” in a post on his social media platform X, and said the jury was used “as a fig leaf” to create a bad precedent. In that same message, Musk accused the judge of effectively granting what he described as a license for charities to be “looted” if the looting remains quiet for a few years.
While the judge indicated early in the trial that she did not want it to become a debate over the dangers of artificial intelligence, AP said concerns about risks—from job losses to mental health issues and even humanity’s extinction—stayed in the background of the proceedings. Protesters outside the courthouse repeatedly became part of the trial’s setting, with demonstrators’ signs, AP reported, criticizing both Musk and Altman as emblematic of an industry directed by out-of-touch billionaires who could not get along.
AP reported that the conflict also cast light on perceived communication and credibility issues inside OpenAI. It described testimony about Altman’s removal from the company’s board in 2023, before he returned to the role a few days later, and said several witnesses—including two ex-board members, Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley—raised concerns about Altman’s truthfulness.
Throughout the trial, AP said OpenAI responded by brushing off Musk’s betrayal allegations as what it described as an unfounded case driven by sour grapes, aimed at undercutting the company’s growth and bolstering Musk’s own artificial intelligence company, xAI, which is now part of SpaceX. The report said evidence shown in court included emails, diary entries and text messages, and that exchanges between Altman and a former OpenAI executive became meme material, including parody songs.
Legal experts and academics quoted by AP framed the case as more than a narrow dispute between two prominent founders. Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute, said the trial was “a reminder of how much the future of AI still depends on a remarkably small group of powerful tech figures and their personal rivalries.” Kreps also described the trial as illustrating “a broader disconnect between the people building these systems and many of the people increasingly expected to live and work alongside them,” AP reported.
Columbia Law School professor Dorothy Lund told AP that the courtroom spectacle illustrated a disconnect between for-profit development and public expectations about how transformative technologies should be governed. “This is a funny microcosm of this moment where we have this hugely important technology that’s being developed by for-profit corporations run by people like Musk and Altman and not as the part of some government-led initiative,” Lund said, according to the wire story.
AP also quoted University of Richmond Law School professor Carl Tobias, who said that dirty-laundry evidence could hurt reputations and produce downstream effects beyond what people anticipate, but added that AI would likely move forward even if OpenAI was affected. “It’s a lot of dirty laundry that doesn’t look very appealing, I suppose, and so that may hurt their reputation and may have downstream effects on all kinds of things that you can’t even anticipate,” Tobias said, adding, “But you know, AI is likely to come forward and continue even if it isn’t OpenAI.”
Both Musk’s SpaceX and OpenAI were described by AP as planning massive initial public offerings, along with Anthropic—formed by seven ex-OpenAI leaders—signaling that the competitive landscape for major AI companies may keep unfolding even as the legal case concluded in procedural fashion.