Musk Loses OpenAI Mission-Breach Case as Court Rules Claims Time-Barred

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, with Musk as a co-founder. He contributed about $38 million in its early years before leaving in 2018. In August 2024, he sued Sam Altman and others in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging they had abandoned the organization's public-interest mission. He sought as much as $134 billion from OpenAI and Microsoft in a case with implications for the company's restructuring and IPO.

On May 18, 2026, a nine-member advisory jury in Oakland unanimously found that Musk had failed to sue within the three-year statute of limitations, following a three-week trial and less than two hours of deliberations. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the verdict and dismissed the claims without considering the merits of the alleged breach of OpenAI's nonprofit commitments. Musk said that day he would appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.