A federal court in California has dismissed Elon Musk's lawsuit against ChatGPT developer OpenAI and its executives, with a jury unanimously ruling that the billionaire missed the statute of limitations.
A federal court in California has dismissed Elon Musk's lawsuit against ChatGPT developer OpenAI and its executives, with a jury unanimously ruling that the billionaire missed the statute of limitations.
As noted in the Reuters article, the verdict removes key legal obstacles for OpenAI on its way to an initial public offering (IPO), which is expected to value the company at around $1 trillion.
The jury took less than two hours to reach a verdict. The court found that Musk knew about OpenAI’s plans to transition to a commercial structure well before the lawsuit was filed in 2024, so his claims were outside the three-year statute of limitations. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with the advisory jury’s conclusion and dismissed the charges, emphasizing the overwhelming evidence in the AI company’s favor.
During the court hearings, the Tesla and SpaceX founder demanded that $134 billion be recovered from the commercial unit of OpenAI in favor of the non-profit. He accused Sam Altman and the company's president, Greg Brockman, of illicit enrichment and betrayal of the original mission.
OpenAI's lawyers have denied all charges and called the lawsuit a hypocritical attempt to harm a competitor. After the verdict was announced, the company's chief lawyer, William Savitt, said that the court had considered the billionaire's statements to be fiction, not fact.
Elon Musk was a key investor and co-founder of OpenAI in 2015, when the organization was founded solely as a non-profit research lab. However, he left the board in 2018 after a failed attempt to take control of the company. OpenAI later created a commercial division to attract billions in investment from Microsoft, which became the formal basis for the lawsuit.
