Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI
Quick Answer
Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman was dismissed by a California jury, which ruled that his claims were filed too late.
Quick Take
Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman was dismissed by a California jury, which ruled that his claims were filed too late. The jury found that any alleged harms occurred before the legal deadline for filing, effectively removing a significant threat to OpenAI ahead of its IPO.
Key Points
- The jury unanimously ruled Musk's claims were filed too late.
- OpenAI's statute of limitations defense proved persuasive to the jury.
- The case's outcome removes restructuring threats for OpenAI's IPO.
- Musk's lead counsel indicated plans to appeal the verdict.
- Testimony included insights from key Silicon Valley figures.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readElon Musk’s claim that he was mistreated by his OpenAI cofounders failed after nine California jurors decided in a unanimous verdict that his lawsuits had been filed too late.
Musk took Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI and Microsoft to of “stealing a charity” by creating a for-profit affiliate to the frontier AI lab. Jurors, however, found that any harms that Musk suffered came before the deadline for filing his claims under the law.
While the trial delved deeply into the melodramatic history of OpenAI and featured testimony from leading figures in Silicon Valley, it ultimately turned on fairly narrow questions of the law. The trial focused on whether and when Altman and the other defendants had made and broken promises to Musk, but the examination failed to convince jurors that he had a valid claim.
In particular, OpenAI had advanced a statute of limitations defense, which sought to prove that any harms Musk sought to litigate had taken place before 2021. (The specific date varied by the charge: before August 5, 2021 for the first count; August 5, 2022, for the second count; and November 14, 2021, for the third count.) Ultimately, the jury found that argument persuasive, which made for a short deliberation period.
“There was a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss it on the spot,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said after the verdict was delivered.
The end of the case means that one major threat to OpenAI — a potential restructuring — is now off the table ahead of its reported IPO.
Reached for comment by TechCrunch, Musk’s lead counsel Marc Toberoff said, “One word: Appeal.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C. You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.fernholz@techcrunch.com or via an encrypted message to tim_fernholz.21 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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