They are fucking insane... Don't believe them...

'It is existential’: Elon Musk and Sam Altman duke it out over OpenAI’s founding

A jury is about to weigh whether Sam Altman deceived Elon Musk into funding OpenAI with promises it would operate as a nonprofit for humanity’s benefit. But the legal team for the world’s richest man faces stiff challenges.

By Christine Mui and Chase DiFeliciantonio

The years-long feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman heads to trial in California today, threatening to blow up OpenAI’s leadership and unravel its hard-won corporate conversion.

Musk, an estranged co-founder of OpenAI who now leads competitor xAI, is claiming that the ChatGPT-maker and Altman abandoned their charitable mission by making moves to shift toward a for-profit model in partnership with Microsoft.

A jury is set to weigh whether Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman breached their founding contract and deceived Musk into funding the startup with promises it would operate as a nonprofit for humanity’s benefit.

If Musk gets his way, the trial could upend the new structure that OpenAI cleared with the attorneys general of California and Delaware last fall, which unlocked billions of dollars in investment for the AI company and opened a path for it to go public as soon as this year.

But the legal team for the world’s richest man faces stiff challenges in the Oakland federal court.

Several legal experts — and even some opponents of the restructuring — doubt U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will reverse it, given that California Attorney General Rob Bonta and his Delaware counterpart, Kathy Jennings, waved it through.

“It’s very, very unlikely that they undo the transaction,” said Samuel Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago who focuses on nonprofits. “His best bet would be monetary damages.”

Anticipation of the trial has built it into a must-watch showdown in one of tech’s fiercest rivalries that has dragged in AI titans beyond Musk and Altman. The case has called into question the motives of the industry’s best-known personalities and raises the prospect of upheaval at OpenAI as it navigates a cash crunch under intensifying pressure from competitors like Anthropic.

Throughout the lawsuit, OpenAI has repeatedly contended that Musk’s actions are designed to benefit xAI by slowing a rival down. It counters that the billionaire initially agreed to the for-profit idea back in 2017.

Gonzalez Rogers — an appointee of former President Obama with a no-nonsense reputation and a history of overseeing high-profile fights between tech companies — has wide latitude in the case to decide what remedy, if any, is needed. She’s breaking the trial into two phases: first to decide if Altman and OpenAI are liable for wrongdoing, and the second, if necessary, to determine a fix.

Jury selection kicks off Monday. The trial is expected to last about four weeks and feature testimony by both Musk and Altman, as well as others who were instrumental in building OpenAI, which was founded with a mission to ensure that ultra-powerful AI systems will benefit everyone. Early OpenAI figures, including Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever, are on the witness list, as is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

In seeking approval for the restructuring last year, OpenAI said the changes — which turned a for-profit arm of the company into a separate public benefit corporation controlled by the nonprofit entity — were necessary to raise enough money to compete in the fast-moving AI sector.

After revising the suit multiple times since 2024, Musk wants to return OpenAI to its original nonprofit structure and send it, rather than himself, any profits that may have been wrongfully obtained at the charity’s expense. He’s also aiming to strip Altman and Brockman of their jobs.

That’s a big ask for courts, legal experts say.

“Will Sam Altman be leading OpenAI in the future? That is not something that judges like to decide,” said Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University. “Judges are reluctant to order remedies that are so prescriptive.”

Peter Molk, a University of Florida law professor specializing in organizational issues, said it would be an extraordinary move for a judge to overrule the findings of two attorneys general.

“The parties that matter have already said, ‘We think this new structure is fine,’” he told POLITICO. “It’d be awfully unusual for a judge to nevertheless come in because of what Musk is saying to say, ‘Well, I, as a judge, don’t think that this new structure with its current directors and management is fine.’”

In January, Musk’s attorneys said OpenAI and Microsoft should pay up to $134 billion in damages — a calculation Gonzalez Rogers said seemed to be pulled “out of air.” The staggering dollar amount was based on the $38 million Musk says he contributed to OpenAI during its early years, although OpenAI has maintained that money was “spent exactly as intended and in service of” its nonprofit mission.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for OpenAI. Geoff Ralston, the former president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, who introduced Altman and Musk, told POLITICO it’s hard to see how OpenAI would continue to function if the court grants Musk all the remedies he has requested, however unlikely.

“All the financing disappears. All the money disappears, and you can’t run a frontier lab without billions of dollars,” Ralston, now an investor in AI safety ventures, said. “It is existential, depending on the remedy the judge chooses.”

Musk brought more than two dozen claims against OpenAI, Altman and Brockman in 2024. But the trial has been whittled down to focus on claims around breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment. Musk’s lawyers, days before its start, dropped additional charges of fraud.

OpenAI declined to comment beyond its court filings, and Musk’s lawyers did not respond to an inquiry.

The jury will provide Gonzalez Rogers with a non-binding advisory verdict and won’t be involved in determining any potential remedies. Musk and his team aren’t allowed to discuss how the case should be resolved until the second part of the trial, slated for mid-May.

Microsoft, as a top investor that still holds a 27 percent stake in OpenAI following the restructuring, is accused of aiding and abetting OpenAI’s alleged breach of charitable trust. It has disputed Musk’s claim, writing in a court filing that he “can point to no evidence that Microsoft had actual knowledge of duties owed to him or their breach.”

The proceedings risk damaging the reputations of Musk and Altman by laying bare OpenAI’s origins. Already, a trove of messages and diary entries has been released that have pulled back a curtain on Silicon Valley’s inner sanctum, revealing, among other things, a private offer by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to help Musk take down social media posts criticizing him for his tenure atop the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Catherine Bracy, CEO of the nonprofit TechEquity, questioned whether Bonta and Jennings had access to further evidence introduced at the trial when striking the deals with OpenAI, pointing to diary entries that she said the attorneys general may not have been aware of at the time. Those deals, including a memorandum of understanding between California and OpenAI, cleared the way for the company to take on its current structure.

“I think the AGs should be asking whether this does change the material facts around which [Bonta] negotiated the MOU,” Bracy said.

Her group is part of a coalition containing dozens of nonprofits that objected to the restructuring and have called for the company’s charitable funds to be placed under independent oversight.

Spokespeople for Bonta and Jennings declined to comment.

Musk’s legal team made an unsuccessful bid to bring Bonta’s office into the case as a defendant, arguing the charitable trust issues fell under his purview. OpenAI also wrote to Bonta earlier this month, asking him to investigate what it called anticompetitive collusion by Musk and Zuckerberg.

Last spring, OpenAI filed a countersuit against Musk, accusing him of an unlawful and relentless harassment campaign that included orchestrating a “sham bid” to buy the company for about $97.4 billion in February 2025.

As part of that claim, OpenAI subpoenaed advocates critical of the restructuring, seeking connections to Musk. It’s unclear whether those subpoenas turned up any smoking guns and if they will play a role in the proceedings.

Other groups that fought against the restructuring are not as confident that the litigation will yield major results when it comes to OpenAI’s structure.

“Back when this lawsuit started, this litigation was the primary venue where that debate was playing out,” said Nathan Calvin, general counsel of the nonprofit Encode.AI, in a statement. His group filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing against OpenAI’s transition before it had gone through. “But now that the AGs in Delaware and CA have gotten deeply involved there are many reasons why they are in a much better position to advocate for the public interest and the charity’s mission,” Calvin added.

Calvin, who received a subpoena from OpenAI after his group filed an amicus court brief supporting some of Musk’s arguments in the case, said he’s focused now on ensuring that “OpenAI abides by the terms of its memorandum of understanding with the CA and Delaware AGs, particularly given the pressures OpenAI may be under to cut corners on those commitments in the context of racing for an IPO.”

Another advocate who challenged the restructuring, California Labor Federation President Lorena Gonzalez, also isn’t holding out hope for an unwinding of the agreement from the bench.

“I think largely we don’t like how it worked out,” Gonzalez, whose federation of unions has increasingly found itself at odds with the state’s AI industry, said. “I’d rather there be some sort of enforcement on the agreement because I don’t trust Elon Musk either.”