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Elon Musk has cleared a major legal hurdle in his long-running dispute with OpenAI, with a U.S. federal judge ruling that his lawsuit over the company’s shift to a for-profit structure can proceed to a jury trial.
According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said during a hearing on Wednesday that there was “plenty of evidence” suggesting OpenAI’s leadership made assurances that the organization would remain a nonprofit focused on the public good. Rather than deciding the matter herself, Rogers ruled that the disputed facts are substantial enough to be weighed by a jury, setting the stage for a trial scheduled for March.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the organization in 2018, alleges that OpenAI abandoned its founding mission by restructuring into a for-profit entity and entering multibillion-dollar commercial partnerships, most notably with Microsoft. He claims those moves violated the assurances that originally convinced him to contribute roughly $38 million — about 60% of OpenAI’s early funding — along with strategic guidance and credibility.
The lawsuit names OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, president Greg Brockman, and Microsoft as defendants. Musk is seeking unspecified monetary damages tied to what he describes as OpenAI’s “ill-gotten gains.” His lead trial attorney, Steven Molo, said after the hearing that the legal team looks forward to “presenting all the evidence of the defendants’ wrongdoing to the jury.”
OpenAI, however, continues to strongly deny the allegations. In a statement following the hearing, the company said, “Mr Musk’s lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial.” OpenAI has also argued that Musk waited too long to bring his claims, an issue the jury will now be asked to consider.
The case adds another layer to the increasingly public rivalry between Musk and OpenAI as competition in generative AI heats up. Musk now runs xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot, which directly competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Last year, Musk’s influence in the AI world was spotlighted when he ranked No. 2 on Time magazine’s annual TIME100 list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence, followed by Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. Just this week, xAI revealed it has raised a massive $20 billion to accelerate development of its AI models and infrastructure.
Notably, Judge Gonzalez Rogers is the same federal judge who previously presided over Fortnite maker Epic Games’ high-profile antitrust lawsuit against Apple, underscoring the significance of her decision to allow Musk’s claims to reach a jury. In a separate legal front, xAI and X, both owned by Musk, are also suing OpenAI and Apple over alleged antitrust violations tied to App Store policies.
As the trial approaches, the outcome could have far-reaching implications — not just for OpenAI’s structure, but for how mission-driven tech organizations balance nonprofit ideals with massive commercial ambitions.
