Because no one has commented yet on the legal significance:

Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.

Because the statute of limitations is a precondition, the jury was not asked to find any other facts. They may tell the press what they thought on other issues, or they may not.

The judge was prepared to immediately accept the jury’s finding, and said she agreed that the jury’s decision was supported by the evidence.

It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely. Whether Musk’s claims are barred by the statute of limitations is a quintessential question of fact, and appellate courts are extraordinarily deferential to factual findings by juries so as a practical matter it’s almost impossible to appeal this verdict.

Aside from the disagreements between these parties, what about the precedent of running a non-profit, and then transferring all IP to a for profit when it’s convenient to do so?

I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.

My suspicion is that winning might have been a secondary goal. When OpenAI goes to IPO, all the testimony of former executives about Altman's behavior is going to be in the public record. A lot of that testimony makes OpenAI sound very chaotic and poorly run. That could prevent large institutional investors from wanting to take the risk.

Anybody read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."

I feel like there still needs to be a penalty to OpenAI here even if that doesn't favor Musk (even though he funded the whole thing). It is still a theft.

I wonder if Elon ever expected to win, or even cared about winning. It's been obvious for a while that OpenAI becoming for-profit historically wasn't really an issue for him, despite what he says in public these days. I imagine that for him the goal was always to damage OpenAI's reputation in order to distract them from progress or raising capital, giving xAI more time to catch up.

I don't think it's a coincidence he didn't bring this suit until after the Altman ouster debacle. Discovery was probably the real objective all along.

Reached for comment by TechCrunch, Musk’s lead counsel Marc Toberoff said, “One word: Appeal.”

One wonders on what grounds?

In the UK, in a civil case like this, the judge I think comments on the likelihood of an appeal avenue once the verdict has been reached.

"Musk announced on X that he will be appealing the decision. "The judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality," he wrote."

Musk is an idiot

Lawyers will be happy to take more of his money

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/18/1137488/elon-mus...

This was one trial where I didn’t want either side to win

The strongest evidence against Musk was Musk. His own 2017 emails supporting for-profit chats made the "betrayal" narrative very hard to sell.

Losing on a technicality kind of sucks ngl

The lawsuit side, genuinely asking, how does the for-profit under non-profit setup work? What are the respective roles? Is the combination effectively a non-profit still? Or is this some kind of legal loophole to make profits under a non-profit?

The donation was also made through a donor advised fund (DAF), which means Musk didn't legally make the donation. I'm surprised he didn't lose on not having standing.

I hope he appeals. Not cheering for Musk, cheering for the fight.

I don't understand why this is a Musk lawsuit and not an IRS lawsuit. How can you take donations under a charity org and then convert it to a for profit corp?

I’m sad to learn this news.

I was really hoping they could somehow both lose.

Costs?

Who cares if the plaintiff or defendant won? The trial had great expository value regarding all the players involved.

it was probably never about winning for Musk, but to leverage the legal system to air out some drama in open AI and some internal dialogue among the execs of the company for bad press.

> A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations.

Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.

Sigheiling really helped his image. He should definitely try attending more jury trials. It will go great!

PS Bravo to his lawyers. Get his cash folks by promising him that he will win!

I think a lot about how there's a very plausible alternate history where Elon Musk controls most of the frontier of AI.

Not sure if I celebrate or not…

Nine jurors, unanimous, under two hours. The statute of limitations argument wasn't even close.

Annoying that it had to be Musk to take this fight, but isn't it very unfortunate that OpenAI is allowed to do this non-profit whoopsie we're now a for-profit thing?

This should clear the path to the IPO and lead to a VERY profitable payday for those holding OpenAI equity. Millionaires and billionaires will be minted ~one year from now.

I'm sure this all has to do with lawyers making as much money as possible — but if that's a potential standing or statute question, why not have a jury settle that question first, before the trial starts? Or to have a narrower process focused only on discovery and facts related to the statute?

Musk may have lost round 1, but Musk has a HUGE pile of cash, and Open AI is a borrower from everybody and their brothers. Almost all the principle people left Open AI already.

You can hate Musk all you want but between him and Scam I'd pick Musk any day.

What they did to him was unfair, he put in all the money, office and initial push, he deserves a piece of the pie he created. This is quite unfair towards him.

So you are allowed to violate the law if you aren't sued quickly enough.

Anyone getting emotional in this thread arguing on behalf of either billionaire should have a long hard look in the mirror.

I don't think justice applies to any entity with a market cap above $500 billion. What do you think would happen to the jury and the judge if they did the right thing and acknowledged that OpenAI is a non-profit? Probably got threatened already. It wouldn't be safe for them. At least they're awake now. I bet this is just like crypto sector.

The correct remedy would be to return OpenAI to its former non-profit structure but that's never going to happen in the current system.

The next thing after 'too big to fail' is 'too big to litigate.'

Stealing a non-profit entity is legal if enough people dump billions of dollars in it.

It isn’t fun when billionaires fight — an asshole always ends up winning.

Both should be fined for wasting our time with fake-troll court cases.

Basically the title of the court case was: "Is Skynet slop going to be helpful to mankind".

We all know how that story ends. Thus, fining both is warranted. When the superrich go to court, they should pay an extra fee. Like a billion per court case or so.

Interesting quotes from the discovery emails. - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr/openai-ema...

"At some point we’d get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn’t be on the governance board"

"generally, safety should be a first-class requirement"

"Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit"

"Because we don't have any financial obligations, we can focus on the maximal positive human impact"

"The underlying philosophy of our company [OpenAI] is to disseminate AI technology as broadly as possible as an extension of all individual human wills, ensuring, in the spirit of liberty, that the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated and evolves toward the future desired by the sum of humanity"

"The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the pay is low compared to what others will offer, but we believe the goal and the structure are right"

"do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone's comp by 100-200k per year?"

"The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it."

"it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes)"

"Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn't sound super hard."

"Powerful ideas are produced by top people. Massive clusters help, and are very worth getting, but they play a less important role."

"Deepmind is causing me extreme mental stress."

"At any given time, we will take the action that is likely to most strongly benefit the world."

"Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft's marketing bitch."

"Ok. Let's figure out the least expensive way to ensure compute power is not a constraint..."

"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved . . . In as little as four years, each overnight experiment will feasibly use so much compute capacity that there’s an actual chance of waking up to AGI"

"We think the path must be: AI research non-profit (through end of 2017), AI research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018), Government project (when: ??)"

"Satisfying this means a situation where, regardless of what happens to the three of them, it's guaranteed that power over the company is distributed after the 2-3 year initial period"

"As mentioned, my experience with boards (assuming they consist of good, smart people) is that they are rational and reasonable. There is basically never a real hardcore battle. . ."

"The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you. As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge. . ."

"Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission"

"During this negotiation, we realized that we have allowed the idea of financial return 2-3 years down the line to drive our decisions . . . this attitude is wrong"

"i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!"

". . .apparently in the last day almost everyone has been told that the for-profit structure is not happening and he [Sam] is happy about this"

"Our goal and mission are fundamentally correct"

"We also have identified a small but finite number of limitations in today's deep learning which are barriers to learning from human levels of experience. And we believe we uniquely are on trajectory to solving safety (at least in broad strokes) in the next three years."

"Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity. Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem, rather than the fig leaf you've noted in other institutions. It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies. Related to this, we need to communicate a "better red than dead" outlook — we're trying to build safe AGI, and we're not willing to destroy the world in a down-to-the-wire race to do so."

"The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before."

"This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."

"all investors are clear that they should never expect a profit"

"We saw no alternative to a structure change given the amount of capital we needed and still to preserve a way to 'give the AGI to humanity' other than the capped profit thing, which also lets the board cancel all equity if needed for safety. Fwiw I personally have no equity and never have."

Maybe if musk continues to be shown he’s a wholly immoral person and a net negative for society he’ll get so fed up he’ll take his ball and hop on his space ship and yeet himself onto the surface of mars. One can hope.

It's interesting that this was 'too late' yet the lawsuit brought against Trump (which he lost) was 30+ years ago with no witnesses, and a filed by a lunatic.

If anything, it shows just how a Jury can be tainted by politics and if you are a Republican in a Blue state with a most likely Blue jury, you have no chance at justice.

Sam is just too good at this game and as I said before [0] is far worse than Elon and also outsmarted him.

Of course this will be appealed but, as you see the claims just don't stick.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651664

Advice for Elon: you can actually use ChatGPT on the web or the desktop app to schedule reminders for you, like "file lawsuit against OpenAI."

Interesting how it played out. Curious will it somehow affect OpenAI business or XAi.

He lost his trial. That is just the first phase of a lawsuit.

It really doesn't matter. OpenAI will surely fail under Sam Altman. Just like Sam's other ventures.

While none of the billionnaires on the stand came across as stellar paragons of virtue, it's hilarious that even they could not stand Elon.

That said, even though Altman is a shifty dude who's clearly playing a Game of Thrones while all others are playing Capitalism, I am extremely grateful that it's him running OpenAI and not Elon.

Seeing what Elon has done to Twitter, I shudder to think of what he'd do with ChatGPT. The level of reach and subtle influence he would have is insane. He could do with private chats what he's doing to public discourse, and it would all be invisible.

On the other hand, seeing what he's done with Grok, it's very likely OpenAI would be where xAI is and would never reach this level of adoption and influence. Which seems to be what most people at OpenAI were really worried about.

This should have been thrown away from the start, not sure why it saw a day in court. Musk himsrlf created xAi that is for profit. If he really is concerned about ai his own actions do not show that. This is just regret that he lost control of OpenAI, a trillion dollar company, and nothing more.

Ending a trial over a bureaucratic technicality is not good justice.

Asking for a hundred billion in damages and having your multi-million dollar legal team defeated not on the merits of the case, but because they literally forgot to look at the calendar lol

It turns out 'stealing a charity' is strictly defined in California law as 'commercializing it with Microsoft instead of my car company.' Glad we finally got that clarified