Closing arguments in Musk v. Altman wrapped Friday in Oakland, with Elon Musk seeking as much as $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft and asking the court to unwind the 2025 restructuring that converted OpenAI's for-profit subsidiary into a public benefit corporation. The jury begins deliberating Monday and is expected to deliver an advisory verdict as soon as next week. The verdict is not binding on US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will decide the case.
The stakes are concrete. A ruling in Musk's favor could disrupt OpenAI's race toward an IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. Meanwhile, xAI is expected to go public as part of SpaceX as early as June at a target valuation of $1.75 trillion, sharpening the question of whether Musk's suit is about OpenAI's mission or about kneecapping a competitor.
Musk's lawyer Steven Molo argued that Sam Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman broke a promise to keep OpenAI a nonprofit developing AI for humanity's benefit, and instead built a for-profit subsidiary that made them extraordinarily wealthy. OpenAI's lawyer Sarah Eddy countered that no such promise was ever made. "No commitments or promises were made. No restrictions were placed on Mr. Musk's donations," she told the jury.
Key facts
- 01Musk is seeking up to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, to be awarded to OpenAI's nonprofit arm.
- 02A ruling for Musk could disrupt OpenAI's path to an IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion.
- 03xAI is expected to go public as part of SpaceX as early as June 2026 at a $1.75 trillion target valuation.
- 04Seven of OpenAI's eight nonprofit board members also sit on the for-profit board; the nonprofit hired employees only a month before trial.
- 05The jury begins deliberating Monday and will deliver an advisory verdict that is not binding on Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
Altman spent the week being grilled on his alleged history of lying and on personal investments in startups that do business with OpenAI, including Helion Energy, in which he holds a one-third stake. Former OpenAI executives Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, along with former board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, have testified that Altman lied to them — the conduct that led to his brief firing as CEO in 2023. Last Friday, the US House oversight committee launched an investigation into Altman's potential conflicts of interest, and attorneys general from more than half a dozen states asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to review them.
“Musk is seeking up to $134 billion in damages and asking the court to unwind OpenAI's 2025 restructuring — a ruling that could derail an IPO priced near $1 trillion.”— Jaeden Schafer
Molo leaned hard on credibility in his close. "Imagine that you're on a hike, and you come upon one of those wooden bridges that you see on a trail, and it's over a gorge," he said. "A woman standing by the entry to the bridge says, 'Don't worry — the bridge is built on Sam Altman's version of the truth.' Would you walk across that bridge?" Altman, seated behind his lawyers, looked up each time his name surfaced.
Altman fired back by painting Musk as a power-seeker. He testified that in 2017, when cofounders were discussing a for-profit arm and asked Musk what would happen to his control if he died, Musk replied, "Maybe the control of OpenAI should pass to my children." Eddy hammered the point in her close: Musk "never cared about the nonprofit structure. What he cared about was winning." Musk himself was absent for closings, having flown to China with President Trump despite the judge's order that he remain available.
The timeline is central to OpenAI's defense. OpenAI created its for-profit subsidiary in 2019, with capped returns for employees and investors. Eddy argued Musk sued too late, filing in 2024 after the statutes of limitations had run. Musk testified he discovered the nonprofit mission had been abandoned only in 2022, when Microsoft was preparing its $10 billion investment — a deal that closed in 2023 and valued OpenAI at $20 billion. "I was disturbed to see OpenAI with a $20B valuation," Musk texted Altman at the time. "This is a bait and switch."
Whether OpenAI is still meaningfully a nonprofit was the trial's other core question. Eddy called it "the best-resourced nonprofit in the world" and said it still controls the for-profit. Molo pointed out that seven of the nonprofit's eight board members also sit on the for-profit board, and that the nonprofit hired employees only a month before trial, doing grant-making rather than AI research. Molo played a clip of Altman calling the board's failure to fire him in 2023 "its own kind of governance failure."
Jill Horwitz, a law professor at Northwestern University who studies nonprofits, was blunt about the structural problem. "We're left with this nonprofit that doesn't have any voice. It doesn't have much money, and OpenAI doesn't think it has any obligation to fund it. It barely has a staff," she said. "It's unclear how on earth the nonprofit is supposed to exercise its duties and control the entire company." In her view, "the public interest in the nonprofit loses, no matter who wins or loses this trial."
AI safety kept intruding despite the judge's first-week warning that the trial wasn't about it. On the last day of testimony, OpenAI's lawyer handed the judge a golden trophy of a donkey's ass inscribed "Never stop being a jackass for safety." It belonged to OpenAI chief futurist Joshua Achiam, who testified Musk had called him a jackass in 2018 for warning that racing toward AGI could compromise safety. Colleagues — including Dario Amodei, now CEO of Anthropic — gave him the trophy. The judge declined to keep it.
Following our coverage of jury selection last week, the deliberation phase is where this case finally produces something tradable. A defense win clears the runway for OpenAI to push toward its IPO at close to $1 trillion without a legal cloud over its corporate structure. A plaintiff win — even an advisory one that Judge Gonzalez Rogers later adopts — forces the question of whether OpenAI's public benefit conversion gets unwound and whether Altman and Brockman keep their seats. Either way, the trial has put a number on the cost of the nonprofit-to-for-profit pivot that every frontier AI lab has now either completed or is contemplating, and that number is going to anchor the next round of governance fights at Anthropic, xAI, and whoever raises capped-profit money next.
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