Breaking News! Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman is over. The jury ruled that Elon Musk had waited too long to sue.
As reported by NBC News (Jury tosses Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, written by David Ingram and available here), a jury today found that tech billionaire Elon Musk waited too long to bring his lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, throwing out the suit that claimed Altman had unlawfully enriched himself from the organization they helped to create.
The jury found Altman, co-founder Greg Brockman and OpenAI not liable on all claims after the blockbuster three-week trial that has captured the attention of the tech industry and that threatened to reshape the race to develop AI.
On the same statute-of-limitations grounds, the jury also rejected Musk’s claim that Microsoft aided and abetted Altman and Brockman in allegedly breaching their duty to OpenAI. Microsoft was an early and large investor in OpenAI’s for-profit operation.
The question of whether Musk dragged his feet before suing was a primary topic of questions when Musk was on the witness stand for three days.
The statute of limitations were strict in the case: three years for a claim that Altman and Brockman breached a duty of charitable trust that they owed to OpenAI as a nonprofit organization, and two years for a claim that they unlawfully enriched themselves from the organization.
OpenAI co-founders including Musk, Altman and Brockman discussed a for-profit conversion as early 2017, and OpenAI created a for-profit arm initially in 2019. Musk sued in 2024.
Musk said during the trial that he waited to sue because he believed reassurances from Altman over the years. He said he finally became fed up in 2023 after Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI’s for-profit arm in exchange for intellectual property rights and a share of future profits.
I guess “time waits for no one” – not even the richest person in the world. 😉 Makes me wonder why we needed three weeks for a trial that was going to be decided by a jury based on what amounts to a technicality of sorts.
Did Altman go unscathed during this trial? No. As I discussed last week, several of his former colleagues portrayed him as untrustworthy.
Will that cost him his job? Maybe not, but the bad publicity can’t be helpful when you’re trying to gear up for a trillion dollar IPO. Making Altman look bad – and possibly costing him his job – may have been Musk’s real goal in all this. If so, he may have lost officially, but “won” in terms of achieving that objective.
So, what do you think? Do you think Altman will keep his job? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
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