The jury's unanimous verdict also found that Musk waited too long to file the lawsuit
Credit: Taylor Hill/Getty; Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- A California jury ruled in favor of Sam Altman after a federal lawsuit brought by Elon Musk in 2024
- The unanimous verdict was reached in less than two hours on Monday, May 18
- An attorney for Musk said they planned to appeal
Jurors in a California courtroom have ruled against Elon Musk following a high-stakes federal trial against OpenAI and the company's CEO Sam Altman.
The nine-panel jury found Altman, co-founder Greg Brockman and OpenAI not liable on all claims and rejected the SpaceX founder's claim that Microsoft, a major stakeholder in OpenAI, aided and abetted Altman and Brockman in allegedly breaching their duty to OpenAI, according to NBC News.
The jury's unanimous verdict also said that Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit, according to Reuters and Axios. The unanimous verdict was reached in less than two hours on Monday, May 18, and was accepted by the judge.
An attorney for Musk said afterward that they planned to appeal, according to The New York Times.
The trial, which began in April, came over a year after Musk, one of OpenAI's co-founders and early investors, filed the suit, arguing that the company defrauded him after the nonprofit focused on artificial intelligence research became a for-profit enterprise behind the popular ChatGPT bot, PEOPLE previously reported.
Musk, the world's richest person, who left OpenAI in 2018 and has his own AI company, has sought monetary damages, as well as to have Altman removed from his position and to have OpenAI converted back into a charitable organization.
OpenAI is still overseen by a nonprofit board, and is now worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The company had denied any wrongdoing, arguing that Musk, 54, knew that the organization would shift to a for-profit company and that when he failed to take over the entity, he left in 2018, according to The Guardian.
Near the start of the trial, Musk testified that OpenAI having a for-profit component would have been fine “as long as the tail did not wag the dog,” The New York Times reported.
“It could kill us all,” he added. “We don't want to have a Terminator outcome. We want to be in a Gene Roddenberry outcome, like Star Trek, not so much a James Cameron movie like Terminator.”
The trial also attempted to argue that Altman could not be trusted through video depositions and witness testimony, according to The Guardian.
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder, was reportedly questioned about a deposition in which the former chief scientist told the board that Altman ‘exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs and pitting his execs against one another.' ” In response, Sutskever said "yes."
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However, Altman argued when he testified that Musk was erratic and difficult to work with, alleging that Musk wanted “total control” over OpenAI, the outlet reported. Testifying that OpenAI built one of the largest charities in the world, Altman then alleged that Musk attempted to "kill it."
On Thursday, May 14, just before closing arguments, Musk appeared in China with President Donald Trump and other high-profile tech executives, according to the Associated Press.
Steven Molo, the Tesla CEO's attorney, told the jury that Musk was “sorry he could not be here," eventually doubling efforts to call Altman a “liar.”
“Sam Altman's credibility is directly at issue in this case. He's the defendants' main witness. The defendants absolutely need you to believe Sam Altman. If you cannot trust him, if you don't believe him, they cannot win. It's that simple,” Molo said, according to the AP.
An OpenAI spokesperson has not responded to PEOPLE's request for comment; neither did an attorney for Musk.
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