Musk v. Altman Fight Heads to Appeal With Core Claims Untested

There was no long, drawn-out wait for the jury’s verdict in the trial of Elon Musk v. Sam Altman. There were no months of waiting as the judge, who would be taking the verdict as an advisory opinion, wrote up her own report on the facts and the law.

Instead, a nine-person federal jury in Oakland, Calif., took less than two hours to deliver a verdict against Musk and in favor of Altman and OpenAI on their statute of limitations defense: Musk simply waited too long to file his lawsuit.

And although the panel’s decision wasn’t binding, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the verdict as her final decision. From the bench, she dismissed Musk’s claims that Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman misused his early donations to OpenAI by converting it to a for-profit company. “There’s a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding,” Gonzalez Rogers said May 18 after the verdict was read.

The anticlimactic outcome of the personality-driven fight between the most important executives in Silicon Valley over the future of OpenAI elevates a far more technical question of when Musk’s legal shot clock began to run. And the use of an advisory jury, instead of a single-judge bench trial, gives some cover and credibility as Musk’s team presents the verdict to courts of appeal and the court of public opinion.

Substantive Issues

The jury, which heard three weeks of testimony and evidence delving into Musk’s messy breakup with OpenAI, didn’t need to wade into the merits of Musk’s claims that Altman and Brockman “stole a charity” by misusing his $38 million in donations to the nonprofit in its early years.

“We haven’t reached those substantive issues yet,” said Shubha Ghosh, a technology law professor at Syracuse University College of Law. “And it’s not quite clear whether we ever will get to see them.”

The first three questions on the verdict form asked if Musk had filed suit within the statute of limitations, in this case three years after the alleged harm occurred. The jury appeared persuaded by OpenAI’s arguments that Musk was aware of the company’s plans to create a for-profit arm as early as 2019. Musk filed the suit in 2024.

In social media posts after the verdict, Musk called the decision a “calendar technicality.” His attorneys vowed to appeal the decision to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

OpenAI’s lead trial attorney William Savitt said at a press conference after the verdict that while he would have appreciated a clean win on the merits, the structure of the verdict form allowed the jury a clear and fast path to siding with OpenAI.

“This decision is not a technical decision, it’s a substantive one,” Savitt said. “You brought your claims too late, and you did it because you were sitting on them to use them as a weapon of a competitor who can’t compete in the marketplace.”

Stavros Gadinis, a law professor at the University of California Berkeley who researches corporate governance, said there’s some truth to both views on whether the verdict was a mere technicality. While court watchers didn’t get the answers they wanted about charitable trusts and nonprofit conversions, Musk’s claim that he suffered an injustice years ago that must be corrected by the court now goes to credibility of the harm.

“The passage of time is not just a technicality, especially for claims like that,” Gadinis said. “It’s an indication of how intensely the harm was felt.”

Advisory Jury

Musk’s claims that reached the trial stage were based on equitable relief—the idea that money cannot fix the wrong. Musk sought the removal of Altman and Brockman and an unwinding of OpenAI’s for-profit conversion.

Those kinds of claims don’t convey a right to a jury trial, and most judges would instead hold a bench trial and examine witnesses and evidence on their own. Gonzalez Rogers held a bench trial in one of her other major tech industry cases involving video game maker Epic Games’ antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The judge took months to render a final written report on the facts of that case in an opinion that ran nearly 200 pages.

In an unusual move, Gonzalez Rogers decided ahead of the Musk v. Altman trial that she would assemble an advisory jury that would render a non-binding verdict to inform her final decision.

Shari Diamond, a law professor at Northwestern University who researches jury processes, said advisory juries are used rarely and their verdicts technically have “no standing” with a higher court reviewing the case.

But advisory juries bring with them clear advantages that lend legitimacy to the trial process in the eyes of the public and the appeals courts, Diamond said, noting that juries give insight into the “conscience of the community.”

Gonzalez Rogers appeared keen on tapping into that conscience.

Just before excusing the jury May 18, Gonzalez Rogers recited a quote from former US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas praising the process of assembling a jury of community members that will render a decision and then recede back into society.

“It is not present the next day to be criticized,” she said. “It is the one government agency that has no ambition.”