May 18, 2026
Elon Musk just suffered a $134 billion loss in potential gains after a jury dismissed his claims against OpenAI and Microsoft. His bid to somehow turn his early investment in OpenAI and his failed subsequent effort to gain control of it have resulted in a definitive rebuke.
It took the jury less than two hours to find that Musk had no case against OpenAI. “There’s a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss on the spot,” U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said.
The verdict not only ends (at least for OpenAI) the multi-year public feud that has frequently seen Musk taking shots at OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, over what he viewed as ill-gotten gains and a stolen charitable trust. This also gives OpenAI a cleaner corporate and market confidence pathway toward its IPO, which is estimated to ultimately give the company a $1 trillion valuation.
As for Musk, he is now left to try to have xAI and its Grok product compete with the likes of OpenAI,Anthropic, and a growing list of focused AI efforts working toward AGI (artificial general intelligence). Although Musk’s lawyers say they may appeal the verdict, the judge indicated that it would likely be a fruitless venture, which seems accurate given how the evidence and testimony in this trial gave the jury a fairly easy decision to agree upon.
UPDATE:
Elon Musk took to Twitter/X.com to respond to the verdict, saying, “Regarding the OpenAI case, the judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality. There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity. The only question is WHEN they did it!” The response is typical for Musk, who rarely accepts defeat easily in public. He followed those comments up with a vow to fight the case beyond the jury’s verdict. “I will be filing an appeal with the Ninth Circuit, because creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America. OpenAI was founded to benefit all of humanity.”
