Jury Begins Deliberating Musk’s OpenAI Case

Jury Deliberations Begin in Musk’s Case Against OpenAI

The courtroom battle between Elon Musk and Sam Altman has entered its final phase, with a nine-person advisory jury in federal court in Oakland beginning deliberations on Monday after closing arguments concluded last week.

At issue is a dispute that began as a fight over OpenAI’s founding ideals and has ended as a public airing of Silicon Valley rivalries, private resentments and competing claims to the future of artificial intelligence. Jurors are weighing whether Mr. Musk filed his suit in time, whether OpenAI’s leaders breached a charitable trust or were unjustly enriched, and whether Microsoft helped enable that conduct.

Though the jury’s verdict is advisory, the case carries unusual weight because Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will make the ultimate decision and has signaled in court filings that she may follow the jury on at least some threshold questions. A finding that Mr. Musk sued too late could effectively end the case. A finding in his favor could open the door to remedies that reach into OpenAI’s governance and future corporate structure.

Mr. Musk, an OpenAI co-founder and early financial backer, sued in 2024, accusing Mr. Altman, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, OpenAI and Microsoft of abandoning the nonprofit mission that was central to the organization’s creation. He has argued that the company was built as a public-interest endeavor and then redirected toward private gain.

OpenAI has countered that Mr. Musk knew that for-profit options were being discussed years ago and that his lawsuit is less about principle than about influence — an effort, the company says, to hobble a powerful competitor after losing sway over its direction.

A Case About Governance, and About Credibility

As the trial moved toward the jury, the legal questions increasingly merged with a broader contest over credibility. Mr. Altman was pressed over allegations of self-dealing and past misstatements involving businesses with ties to OpenAI. Mr. Musk, in turn, was portrayed by OpenAI’s lawyers as a man preoccupied with power and control, willing to recast history after failing to dominate the organization he helped found.

The proceedings featured a parade of prominent witnesses and an unusually intimate record: text messages, emails, diary entries and internal communications that pulled back the curtain on one of the most influential companies in artificial intelligence. Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, testified. So did Shivon Zilis, a Musk associate and the mother of some of his children. Both Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman spent hours on the stand under bruising cross-examination.

What emerged was not a clarifying morality play but a portrait of two camps willing to accuse the other of betrayal while exposing their own contradictions. In the process, the trial has fueled a growing sense, among analysts and commentators following the case, that whatever the legal outcome, neither side is likely to leave the courtroom looking strengthened.

That reputational damage may prove to be one of the case’s most enduring consequences. The dispute has highlighted the distance between OpenAI’s public-interest rhetoric and the ferocious private struggle around who controls a technology that could shape economies, labor markets and national power. It has also undercut efforts by both men to present themselves as singularly trustworthy stewards of transformative systems.

What Musk Could Still Win

The stakes, however, are not merely symbolic.

If Mr. Musk prevails, the case could affect OpenAI’s governance and future plans. Reporting on the litigation has indicated that he is seeking structural changes and the removal of Mr. Altman. Any ruling on liability could push the court into the more difficult question of remedy: whether OpenAI’s corporate evolution should be constrained, whether prior restructuring steps could be unwound in any meaningful way, and how deeply a court can intervene in an organization sitting at the center of the global AI race.

Those questions matter because OpenAI has already been adjusting its structure amid intense scrutiny. In 2025, the company said its nonprofit would remain in control while its for-profit arm shifted to a public benefit corporation. It later described that arrangement as an OpenAI Foundation overseeing OpenAI Group PBC — an effort to preserve a mission-driven framework while still raising the vast sums needed to build advanced AI systems.

That hybrid model has become central to the broader debate over whether frontier AI companies can credibly balance public obligations with investor demands and competitive pressures. Mr. Musk’s lawsuit has turned that abstract governance question into a test case.

Beyond the Feud

Yet for all the testimony, spectacle and score-settling, the trial has not resolved the larger issue hanging over the industry: who should control frontier AI, and what meaningful constraints should exist when organizations created in the name of humanity begin to resemble conventional corporate empires.

The legal contest has instead narrowed those concerns into a bitter feud between two men whose relationship long ago curdled from alliance into open hostility. That may be one reason the case has come to feel, even to some close observers, both consequential and oddly insufficient — rich in revelations about personalities and power, but thinner on answers about the public interest.

For now, the next step belongs to the jury. But the larger verdict, on the governance of AI and the credibility of the people building it, is likely to take much longer.

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