The three-week trial pitting Elon Musk against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ended without a verdict on the merits, after a federal jury in Oakland, California, determined Musk’s lawsuit missed a statutory deadline and dismissed it on Monday. While jurors did not weigh the underlying accusations, the court record built a detailed timeline of how key players in the early AI industry argued about the scale of money and computing resources needed to compete.
Musk had brought the case claiming OpenAI betrayed its charitable mission, including allegations that Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman went behind his back and unjustly enriched themselves. In response, OpenAI said Musk supported plans to form a for-profit company and also filed its own 2024 lawsuit seeking to undercut the ChatGPT maker’s success as he built his AI company, xAI.
During testimony, executives and company figures described how deeply the cost of scaling AI shaped their internal decisions long before today’s AI stock-market boom. The trial record included an email Musk sent in 2018 to Altman and other OpenAI co-founders, in which Musk said, “Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough,” and added, “This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.” The email was presented as reflecting Musk’s assessment of what it would take to keep pace in the race against well-funded rivals.
OpenAI, which began in 2015 as a nonprofit focused on developing AI for the common good, is now described in the trial coverage as a capitalistic enterprise valued at $852 billion. As San Francisco-based OpenAI and other AI companies moved toward large Wall Street debuts, the trial raised questions about whether the direction of AI development can be steered by anything other than commercial interests.
Karan Girotra, a professor of operations, technology, and innovation at Cornell Tech, testified that the early uncertainty around AI made investment risky, but that now, “investment in AI is no longer speculative.” He told jurors that the shift reflected how the field has moved beyond uncertain bets. “Now it’s traditional investment in something we know works,” Girotra said, adding, “People want your car, you need to build the factory ahead of demand.”
Microsoft’s role also emerged as a central part of the story. Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, told jurors that Microsoft opted to invest billions to help build OpenAI’s technology after Musk quit OpenAI’s board in 2018. Scott said the decision reflected skepticism inside Microsoft at the time. “It was before ChatGPT,” Scott said, and he described that “so most of the people at Microsoft were very skeptical about whether or not all of these claims were going to materialize into reality.”
Scott told jurors that OpenAI explained what Microsoft needed was more data and more computing resources, and that meeting those needs required large, expensive projects. “The things that they wanted and ultimately that we helped them do were very capital-intensive projects like building giant data centers, full of very expensive computers and networks,” he said, linking the corporate effort to the practical cost of running and expanding advanced AI systems.
The trial record also traced how OpenAI’s early technical milestones prompted internal soul-searching about funding and structure. More than five years before OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, the company achieved a breakthrough when it taught an AI system to beat professional players of Dota 2. Sam Altman testified that while the world’s reaction to that result was limited compared with his expectations, internally it felt like proof that their approach could tackle difficult problems: “Honestly, the world reacted to it somewhat less than I thought they should have, but to us internally, it really felt like a moment where we had shown that our technology, using something called reinforcement learning, could take on an enormously complex task.”
Altman testified that after OpenAI’s Dota 2 victory in 2017, Musk pressed for more capital. “He was impressed,” Altman said of Musk, and “And then immediately after the Dota win, Mr. Musk said he thought we really need to get more serious and figure out how to get way more capital.” The Dota victory, coverage said, raised questions about how OpenAI could compete when it relied heavily on donors and remained structured as a nonprofit.
For former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, the Dota win marked the start of a broader discussion about whether OpenAI should become for-profit to raise money more easily. “The realization is that to make progress in AI, you need a big computer,” Sutskever told jurors, adding, “And you need the big computer because the brain is a big computer. You have a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trillion synapses in the brain.”
As the dispute unfolded in court, the testimony described a battle of wills among leadership figures, including competition for control of OpenAI and Musk’s later efforts to fold the AI lab into Tesla, while other leaders resisted. The coverage said Musk eventually quit, and the trial record placed the cost question—how to fund the buildout of computing power—at the center of the disagreement.
The jury ultimately dismissed Musk’s lawsuit on procedural grounds, meaning it did not deliver a verdict addressing what drove OpenAI’s shift or the merits of Musk’s claims about the company’s nonprofit origins and its leadership’s conduct.