Because no one has commented yet on the legal significance:
Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Because the statute of limitations is a precondition, the jury was not asked to find any other facts. They may tell the press what they thought on other issues, or they may not.
The judge was prepared to immediately accept the jury’s finding, and said she agreed that the jury’s decision was supported by the evidence.
It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely. Whether Musk’s claims are barred by the statute of limitations is a quintessential question of fact, and appellate courts are extraordinarily deferential to factual findings by juries so as a practical matter it’s almost impossible to appeal this verdict.
If I had been on the jury, I would have found against Musk on every point.
His lawyers created a “3 phases of doubt” to try and sidestep the statute of limitations, but it was clearly bogus and he was on notice of OpenAI creating a for-profit in 2019.
Musk was perfectly happy to have OpenAI be a for-profit, a non-profit with an attached for-profit (the current structure), or even just absorbed into Tesla. His complaints fell flat for me given the number of emails where he said that a non-profit was likely a mistake.
This is technical, but Musk clearly never created a charitable trust, which was a precondition for his claims. His funds were donated for general use by OpenAI, not for any specific use that would allow him to claim breach of charitable trust. Also, all of his funds were spent by no later than 2020 which is before his alleged breach in 2023.
Musk unreasonably delayed bringing this case until the success of ChatGPT and starting a competing AI company, and he had unclean hands because he attempted to sabotage OpenAI repeatedly by poaching its key staff while on the board.
Musk should have just made another company and then he’d have another 500 billion but he had that mistake and now it’s over. Then again we’ll see how well open ai does over the long term
I'm unfamiliar with the US legal system but do they really need a jury and a trial to determine whether the claims are barred by the statute of limitations? Couldn't this be decided by a judge before trial?
Part of the Statute of Limitations isn't just on when he filed the claim, but when he found out or should have found out, by reasonable diligence that he had a claim at all.
So the question before the jury has a significant component of "Should he have found out by this time?" Which is a question of fact, and facts are typically decided by juries, in the US at least.
The two parties can agree together to let a judge decide facts like this, but generally, if one or the other party wants it to go to a jury, it does.
I'm guessing part of Musk's strategy was to have it go to the jury, which are often seen as easier to manipulate than judges, especially when a case is weak. Or perhaps his team already knew this particular judge would be inclined to rule against him, so did the next best thing.
Elon argued that even though the events in question took place sometime between 2017 and 2020 OpenAI intentionally hid the information from him until 2022-2023 which is why he wasn't able to file the lawsuit until 2024.
That's what the jury found against - they said he was reasonably informed enough to have brought the suit earlier and thus the 3 year clock should start ticking in 2020 not 2023.
In the US, judges make determinations of law, but juries (in a jury trial at least) must evaluate the evidence to make findings of fact. So the jury would need to make a finding as to when the statute of limitations started ticking based on the evidence, and the judge then makes the legal determination that the statutory period has lapsed.
For people unfamiliar, generally speaking in trial courts the jury is the finder of facts and the judge is the finder of law (yes, there are bench trials where the judge does both). As an aside, appeals courts deal in legal issues (ie statutory interpretations and constitutional issues).
So not being within the statute of limitations is typically a legal issue so what must've happened here is the jury would've been asked if the earlier OpenAI-MS deals were substantially similar to the latest deal. I can't find the verdict form or the jury instructions but I'll bet that was the key issue the jury decided.
>Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Why is a hypothetical ground for this decision? "You didn't complain immediately the first time you got robbed, therefore all the robbing since then is covered by a statute of limitation".
The statute of limitations exists to prevent unreasonable delay, to protect defendants from prejudice due to loss of evidence to the passage of time, and to recognize that people who are injured tend to complain immediately and not sit on their claims.
This case demonstrates why. Musk only complained after OpenAI was commercially successful with ChatGPT and after he started a competing effort. He repeatedly said “I do not know” and “I do not recall” on the stand, and argued that the passage of time made it hard for him to remember facts that would have been helpful for OpenAI.
"If the jury determines that at any time before those dates, Musk either knew — or had or should have known — that he had a claim that he could bring, then his suit was brought too late. The consequence of being too late is swift and absolute. If the lawsuit was filed late for a particular claim, that claim is out of the case; if it was too late for all of Musk’s claims, the lawsuit is over."
That's where the question of fact (i.e., the requirement for a jury decision) came in: "What was the statute of limitations?" is a question of law, but "When should Musk have known that OpenAI was moving too much toward for-profit?" is a question of fact (and, here, determines whether the statute of limitations applies).
There are multiple reasons why statutes of limitations exist, one of them being that the further away in time, the harder it is to prove evidence. Witnesses may have died, or their memory may be more faulty.
Because there has to be some point. It's unjust to allow someone to sue 30 years later, as everyone would have a sword of Damocles hanging over their head waiting for the right moment to strike. And in general, if you didn't realize you were robbed for 3 years, perhaps it's the case that you weren't actually robbed.
This is not a robbery, though. Not in the "break in and steal stuff from your house multiple times" situation. Legally, each of those are separate events, and one doesn't really affect the other unless it's all the same person, and the repetition is used to get a stronger case, etc.
There are several legal principles in play here. Note that these are civil trial issues and when you're talking about "robbing", you're likely talking about a criminal issue. These are:
1. Estoppel. If a party relies on your conduct then you can lose the right to sue over it;
2. Laches. This is a defense against prejudicial conduct, typically by waiting too long to take action;
3. Waiver. Your conduct can waive your right to sue. Imagine you live with someone and they don't pay half of the rent so you cover it. At some point your continued conduct means you lose the right to sue; and
4. The statute of limitations. Some claims simply have to be brought within a certain period. How this applies can be really complex. For example, we saw this in Trump's fraud convictions in New York. His time in office, away from the jurisdiction, essentially suspended the statute of limitations.
Some crimes like murder have no statute of limitations. Others have unreasonably short statutes of limitations. For example, probably nobody can be charged in relation to sex trafficking in the Epstein saga because the statute of limitations is often 5 years with such crimes. This is unreasonable (IMHO) because often the victims are children and unable to make a criminal complaint.
It's also worth adding that not all legal systems have such wide-ranging statutes of limitation as the US does. Founding principles of those other legal systems is that the government shouldn't be arbitrarily restricted for prosecuting criminal conduct. The US system ostensibly favors "timely" prosecution.
To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
I feel like there still needs to be a penalty to OpenAI here even if that doesn't favor Musk (even though he funded the whole thing). It is still a theft.
Wait but that’s the crux of his argument that he was “wronged”. Not “wronged but only once xAI started competing with OpenAI”. He can’t prove the former, if the latter is true.
If anyone is/was truly still wronged by OpenAI changing corporate structure they are still able to sue and prove damages. Yet surprisingly no one has come forward on this.
Nobody else has come forward because the number of people with a potential legal claim for asserting any such harm was a small group of between 2 and 6 people, of which Musk was one (setting aside SOL issues).
Right. Nobody cares whether Musk won or lost (well maybe a few do). People actually following the case wanted to know whether OpenAI would be held in any way accountable for anything. And this “resolution” does not satisfy. Before Musk got involved, what happened at OpenAI was a BigProblem for many people.
To be fair, is there any corporation or high net worth individual ever who, after losing a lawsuit, said “You know what, we accept the court’s decision that we were wrong and will be reflecting on how to do better in the future.”
No. Once the jury made its finding of fact as to when the event giving rise to the claim occurred (and to when the SOL clock would start ticking), the appeal would have to determine that the jury could not have reasonably made such a finding. It's very, very rare for an appeals court to overturn a finding of fact.
Typically if they bring up a case like this a judge again will get pissy and dismiss it with prejudice.
You can try to file it again, but that gets to the point where the judge can throw your ass directly in jail for 30 days, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
Filing the same lawsuit a second time is different. They're talking about appealing the decision in this case. You don't get tossed in jail for that.
But (at least in the US), the appeals court does not have to accept your appeal. When you file the appeal, you have to give them enough reason for them to even listen to your appeal, instead of rejecting it from the first filing.
Are you a lawyer? IANAL but my understanding is it would be difficult for an appeal to succeed. Appeals courts only evaluate review matters of law, not of fact. Whether is has been more than the 3 year limit the statute of limitations places is a matter of fact I think. And the advisory jury makes this much harder to appeal. What do you think the grounds for appeal will be?
In this case, I think it is a jury's finding of fact re: the statute of limitations. Unless the appellate court finds that the trial court and jury is clearly erroneous, it will usually give significant deference to that finding.
A state of limitations case is actually one of the strongest kinds of legal defenses a defendant can have.
It's a foundational issue that goes to whether the court is even allowed to proceed with the case. A defendant could be guilty/liable/whatever of the alleged claims, and it wouldn't matter. If the statute of limitations has run, they're in the clear.
The only counter to an SOL defense is to try and claim that the SOL was paused for some reason, but those exceptions are very narrow and wouldn't apply here (and in the real world very rarely apply to civil cases).
Aside from the disagreements between these parties, what about the precedent of running a non-profit, and then transferring all IP to a for profit when it’s convenient to do so?
I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.
This case sets no precedent one way or the other on that question. The IP was transferred to the for-profit for fair value in 2019, and Musk never argued otherwise in this case.
The attorneys general of California and Delaware could challenge that 2019 IP transfer if they so wished on behalf of the public.
Transactions like that happen all the time and are not problematic if handled legally. Any of the interested parties could have sued over it, but none have.
Because they got to participate in the early investment in the for profit entity.
> Early Angels (Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and others): Approximately $10 million invested, current value $1.4 billion. That corresponds to a return of around 140x.
Yeah. I wonder if the question "Did OpenAI steal a non-profit worth what is now maybe hundreds of billions of dollars?" will ever be answered. If not it will be one of the biggest heists in history.
The non-profit received shares in the for-profit as a result of the transfer. Those shares are theoretically worth hundreds of billions.
If it had been a for-profit company contributing assets to another for-profit company, the transaction would not have had any different tax consequence.
While none of the billionnaires on the stand came across as stellar paragons of virtue, it's hilarious that even they could not stand Elon.
That said, even though Altman is a shifty dude who's clearly playing a Game of Thrones while all others are playing Capitalism, I am extremely grateful that it's him running OpenAI and not Elon.
Seeing what Elon has done to Twitter, I shudder to think of what he'd do with ChatGPT. The level of reach and subtle influence he would have is insane. He could do with private chats what he's doing to public discourse, and it would all be invisible.
On the other hand, seeing what he's done with Grok, it's very likely OpenAI would be where xAI is and would never reach this level of adoption and influence. Which seems to be what most people at OpenAI were really worried about.
it was probably never about winning for Musk, but to leverage the legal system to air out some drama in open AI and some internal dialogue among the execs of the company for bad press.
The donation was also made through a donor advised fund (DAF), which means Musk didn't legally make the donation. I'm surprised he didn't lose on not having standing.
This should have been thrown away from the start, not sure why it saw a day in court. Musk himsrlf created xAi that is for profit. If he really is concerned about ai his own actions do not show that. This is just regret that he lost control of OpenAI, a trillion dollar company, and nothing more.
The lawsuit side, genuinely asking, how does the for-profit under non-profit setup work? What are the respective roles? Is the combination effectively a non-profit still? Or is this some kind of legal loophole to make profits under a non-profit?
Lots of non-profits use structures like that, it's not uncommon. Non-profit vs. for-profit is mostly a legal and accounting distinction; many laypeople confuse "non-profit" with "charity" and they are very different.
IANAL but civil statute of limitations is based on when the prosecuting party reasonably discovered they were wronged and had legal recourse, not when the event happened. It is entirely possible to debate when that was in this case.
Annoying that it had to be Musk to take this fight, but isn't it very unfortunate that OpenAI is allowed to do this non-profit whoopsie we're now a for-profit thing?
> A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations.
Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.
This should clear the path to the IPO and lead to a VERY profitable payday for those holding OpenAI equity. Millionaires and billionaires will be minted ~one year from now.
You can hate Musk all you want but between him and Scam I'd pick Musk any day.
What they did to him was unfair, he put in all the money, office and initial push, he deserves a piece of the pie he created. This is quite unfair towards him.
Yes. This has always been, and will always be, the case. It's the same in things like copyright law - you can violate any software license if the copyright holder doesn't know you're doing it, or doesn't want to sue you, or doesn't sue you in time. It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.
Well, you're allowed to violate the contract if you aren't sued quickly enough. You're allowed to violate the law if you aren't prosecuted quickly enough (for some crimes).
I've thought about that, too, but it would require that all of the key individuals at OpenAI would have been willing to stay at OpenAI under his ownership.
That seems unlikely to me given how divisive he is. OpenAI already had one existential leadership crisis without Musk. I doubt it would have fair better under his notoriously difficult leadership. If he had wrestled control away, I would expect an exodus of employees going to new companies.
You speak as if Elon Musk didn't buy tons of AI chips for full self driving (Dojo) and COMPLETELY flub it.
It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.
I absolute abhor the man but I think this is silly. No doubt that he has had luck and help, but he is still a good businessman. He's certainly an asshole (almost certainly dark triad territory), but I think that can be a benefit when creating a business.
As I understand it, Anthropic exists in part as a quirk of how Dario Amodei's experience at OpenAI went. In the world where Musk controls OpenAI, I don't think you can assume Anthropic splinters off the same way (for overdetermined reasons! I'm not saying Musk is a better manager.)
Musk may have lost round 1, but Musk has a HUGE pile of cash, and Open AI is a borrower from everybody and their brothers. Almost all the principle people left Open AI already.
That's misunderstanding the finances involved here. OpenAI is a privately held company; sure, that means they're "borrowing" from their investors technically. But that's in exactly the same sense that a public company is actually "owned" by its shareholders. The behavioral relationship goes the other way: people own bits of the company because they want it to do well and their share to grow in size, not because they expect the debt/dividend to be repaid per se.
In point of fact most valuations place OpenAI in the hundreds of billions of dollars already and growing rapidly.
Basically, no: OpenAI's pockets are deeper than Musks's personal wealth. Especially so considering that this suit is existentially important to them where Musk needs to maintain leverage for other efforts.
That's not what the article stated. The jury had to find that the harms occurred prior to certain dates in 2021, not that Musk had to file before then.
Both should be fined for wasting our time with fake-troll court cases.
Basically the title of the court case was: "Is Skynet slop going to be helpful to mankind".
We all know how that story ends. Thus, fining both is warranted. When the superrich go to court, they should pay an extra fee. Like a billion per court case or so.
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
> Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.
> We publish at top machine learning conferences, open-source software tools for accelerating AI research, and release blog posts to communicate our research. We will not keep information private for private benefit, but in the long term, we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns.
I think it's fair to say the headline misleads, even if technically accurate. My initial read was that he had lost on the merits of the case, and not "jury rules Musk sued too late".
I recognize the value of the statute of limitations, but it is a technicality, and unfortunately, the central legal questions of this case were not addressed.
Can some lawyer explain the rationale of statute of limitations? Like why does a robber get to get away with the crime if they are able to evade the police for x number of years. Is it just because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything?
I am absolutely certain that if Sam was suing xAI and the case got dismissed on a technicality people would be lined up with screeds about the injustice of the situation.
If you consider a statute of limitations to be a mere bureaucratic technicality, then you might as well say we shouldn't have the entire Anglo-American legal system.
Moreover, there is no "justice" here either way--it's just rich people suing each other.
It turns out 'stealing a charity' is strictly defined in California law as 'commercializing it with Microsoft instead of my car company.' Glad we finally got that clarified
Because no one has commented yet on the legal significance:
Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Because the statute of limitations is a precondition, the jury was not asked to find any other facts. They may tell the press what they thought on other issues, or they may not.
The judge was prepared to immediately accept the jury’s finding, and said she agreed that the jury’s decision was supported by the evidence.
It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely. Whether Musk’s claims are barred by the statute of limitations is a quintessential question of fact, and appellate courts are extraordinarily deferential to factual findings by juries so as a practical matter it’s almost impossible to appeal this verdict.
My own thoughts:
If I had been on the jury, I would have found against Musk on every point.
His lawyers created a “3 phases of doubt” to try and sidestep the statute of limitations, but it was clearly bogus and he was on notice of OpenAI creating a for-profit in 2019.
Musk was perfectly happy to have OpenAI be a for-profit, a non-profit with an attached for-profit (the current structure), or even just absorbed into Tesla. His complaints fell flat for me given the number of emails where he said that a non-profit was likely a mistake.
This is technical, but Musk clearly never created a charitable trust, which was a precondition for his claims. His funds were donated for general use by OpenAI, not for any specific use that would allow him to claim breach of charitable trust. Also, all of his funds were spent by no later than 2020 which is before his alleged breach in 2023.
Musk unreasonably delayed bringing this case until the success of ChatGPT and starting a competing AI company, and he had unclean hands because he attempted to sabotage OpenAI repeatedly by poaching its key staff while on the board.
Musk should have just made another company and then he’d have another 500 billion but he had that mistake and now it’s over. Then again we’ll see how well open ai does over the long term
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I'm unfamiliar with the US legal system but do they really need a jury and a trial to determine whether the claims are barred by the statute of limitations? Couldn't this be decided by a judge before trial?
Part of the Statute of Limitations isn't just on when he filed the claim, but when he found out or should have found out, by reasonable diligence that he had a claim at all.
So the question before the jury has a significant component of "Should he have found out by this time?" Which is a question of fact, and facts are typically decided by juries, in the US at least.
The two parties can agree together to let a judge decide facts like this, but generally, if one or the other party wants it to go to a jury, it does.
I'm guessing part of Musk's strategy was to have it go to the jury, which are often seen as easier to manipulate than judges, especially when a case is weak. Or perhaps his team already knew this particular judge would be inclined to rule against him, so did the next best thing.
Elon argued that even though the events in question took place sometime between 2017 and 2020 OpenAI intentionally hid the information from him until 2022-2023 which is why he wasn't able to file the lawsuit until 2024.
That's what the jury found against - they said he was reasonably informed enough to have brought the suit earlier and thus the 3 year clock should start ticking in 2020 not 2023.
In the US, judges make determinations of law, but juries (in a jury trial at least) must evaluate the evidence to make findings of fact. So the jury would need to make a finding as to when the statute of limitations started ticking based on the evidence, and the judge then makes the legal determination that the statutory period has lapsed.
In the American system juries figure out questions of fact and judges figure out questions of law.
In this case I guess the question was 'when did the incident actually happen' with Elon arguing it was later then Altman.
In this case the judge determined that it did require a trial and refused to dismiss based on statute of limitations.
For people unfamiliar, generally speaking in trial courts the jury is the finder of facts and the judge is the finder of law (yes, there are bench trials where the judge does both). As an aside, appeals courts deal in legal issues (ie statutory interpretations and constitutional issues).
So not being within the statute of limitations is typically a legal issue so what must've happened here is the jury would've been asked if the earlier OpenAI-MS deals were substantially similar to the latest deal. I can't find the verdict form or the jury instructions but I'll bet that was the key issue the jury decided.
>Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Why is a hypothetical ground for this decision? "You didn't complain immediately the first time you got robbed, therefore all the robbing since then is covered by a statute of limitation".
The statute of limitations exists to prevent unreasonable delay, to protect defendants from prejudice due to loss of evidence to the passage of time, and to recognize that people who are injured tend to complain immediately and not sit on their claims.
This case demonstrates why. Musk only complained after OpenAI was commercially successful with ChatGPT and after he started a competing effort. He repeatedly said “I do not know” and “I do not recall” on the stand, and argued that the passage of time made it hard for him to remember facts that would have been helpful for OpenAI.
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https://localnewsmatters.org/2026/05/16/musk-v-altman-week-3... has a good explanation of the legalities:
"If the jury determines that at any time before those dates, Musk either knew — or had or should have known — that he had a claim that he could bring, then his suit was brought too late. The consequence of being too late is swift and absolute. If the lawsuit was filed late for a particular claim, that claim is out of the case; if it was too late for all of Musk’s claims, the lawsuit is over."
That's where the question of fact (i.e., the requirement for a jury decision) came in: "What was the statute of limitations?" is a question of law, but "When should Musk have known that OpenAI was moving too much toward for-profit?" is a question of fact (and, here, determines whether the statute of limitations applies).
There are multiple reasons why statutes of limitations exist, one of them being that the further away in time, the harder it is to prove evidence. Witnesses may have died, or their memory may be more faulty.
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Because there has to be some point. It's unjust to allow someone to sue 30 years later, as everyone would have a sword of Damocles hanging over their head waiting for the right moment to strike. And in general, if you didn't realize you were robbed for 3 years, perhaps it's the case that you weren't actually robbed.
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This is not a robbery, though. Not in the "break in and steal stuff from your house multiple times" situation. Legally, each of those are separate events, and one doesn't really affect the other unless it's all the same person, and the repetition is used to get a stronger case, etc.
There are several legal principles in play here. Note that these are civil trial issues and when you're talking about "robbing", you're likely talking about a criminal issue. These are:
1. Estoppel. If a party relies on your conduct then you can lose the right to sue over it;
2. Laches. This is a defense against prejudicial conduct, typically by waiting too long to take action;
3. Waiver. Your conduct can waive your right to sue. Imagine you live with someone and they don't pay half of the rent so you cover it. At some point your continued conduct means you lose the right to sue; and
4. The statute of limitations. Some claims simply have to be brought within a certain period. How this applies can be really complex. For example, we saw this in Trump's fraud convictions in New York. His time in office, away from the jurisdiction, essentially suspended the statute of limitations.
Some crimes like murder have no statute of limitations. Others have unreasonably short statutes of limitations. For example, probably nobody can be charged in relation to sex trafficking in the Epstein saga because the statute of limitations is often 5 years with such crimes. This is unreasonable (IMHO) because often the victims are children and unable to make a criminal complaint.
It's also worth adding that not all legal systems have such wide-ranging statutes of limitation as the US does. Founding principles of those other legal systems is that the government shouldn't be arbitrarily restricted for prosecuting criminal conduct. The US system ostensibly favors "timely" prosecution.
thanks for the snippet
If it's thrown out on a technicality then Musk got fleeced by his lawyers - good for them.
The strongest evidence against Musk was Musk. His own 2017 emails supporting for-profit chats made the "betrayal" narrative very hard to sell.
Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him.
e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.
I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?
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To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
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Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business
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Extreme smartness has its own failure modes
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There was no decision made on this basis. It was dismissed entirely due to the elapsed statute of limitations.
He lost the lawsuit on a legal technicality about the statute of limitations not on substantive grounds.
I feel like there still needs to be a penalty to OpenAI here even if that doesn't favor Musk (even though he funded the whole thing). It is still a theft.
Need standing to claim theft, need to be within statue of limitations.
It's not theft unless a jury says it is, they didn't say it is.
Anybody read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
Wait but that’s the crux of his argument that he was “wronged”. Not “wronged but only once xAI started competing with OpenAI”. He can’t prove the former, if the latter is true.
If anyone is/was truly still wronged by OpenAI changing corporate structure they are still able to sue and prove damages. Yet surprisingly no one has come forward on this.
Maybe one of the scientists who cashed out 8 figures will file a suit that OpenAI has wronged them by depriving them of the joy of working
Nobody else has come forward because the number of people with a potential legal claim for asserting any such harm was a small group of between 2 and 6 people, of which Musk was one (setting aside SOL issues).
Yeah people are going to make up a lot of reasons why Elon lost that have nothing to do with the actual and very simple reason.
Right. Nobody cares whether Musk won or lost (well maybe a few do). People actually following the case wanted to know whether OpenAI would be held in any way accountable for anything. And this “resolution” does not satisfy. Before Musk got involved, what happened at OpenAI was a BigProblem for many people.
Reached for comment by TechCrunch, Musk’s lead counsel Marc Toberoff said, “One word: Appeal.”
One wonders on what grounds?
In the UK, in a civil case like this, the judge I think comments on the likelihood of an appeal avenue once the verdict has been reached.
To be fair, is there any corporation or high net worth individual ever who, after losing a lawsuit, said “You know what, we accept the court’s decision that we were wrong and will be reflecting on how to do better in the future.”
Never. That never ever happens.
On the grounds of "I have infinite money and lawyers to drag this thing out forever, whether I'll win or not."
Nothing like 'vexatious litigation' in the US?
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vexatious-litigants
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To any lawyers in here, is there an argument to be made for the statue of limitations not to apply here
No. Once the jury made its finding of fact as to when the event giving rise to the claim occurred (and to when the SOL clock would start ticking), the appeal would have to determine that the jury could not have reasonably made such a finding. It's very, very rare for an appeals court to overturn a finding of fact.
> One wonders on what grounds?
Invent a time machine; send a lawyer back to file a new lawsuit within the statute of limitations.
Typically if they bring up a case like this a judge again will get pissy and dismiss it with prejudice.
You can try to file it again, but that gets to the point where the judge can throw your ass directly in jail for 30 days, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
Filing the same lawsuit a second time is different. They're talking about appealing the decision in this case. You don't get tossed in jail for that.
But (at least in the US), the appeals court does not have to accept your appeal. When you file the appeal, you have to give them enough reason for them to even listen to your appeal, instead of rejecting it from the first filing.
He lost on the grounds of a statue of limitations defense which is exactly the kind of thing which is easily appealable.
Are you a lawyer? IANAL but my understanding is it would be difficult for an appeal to succeed. Appeals courts only evaluate review matters of law, not of fact. Whether is has been more than the 3 year limit the statute of limitations places is a matter of fact I think. And the advisory jury makes this much harder to appeal. What do you think the grounds for appeal will be?
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In this case, I think it is a jury's finding of fact re: the statute of limitations. Unless the appellate court finds that the trial court and jury is clearly erroneous, it will usually give significant deference to that finding.
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A state of limitations case is actually one of the strongest kinds of legal defenses a defendant can have.
It's a foundational issue that goes to whether the court is even allowed to proceed with the case. A defendant could be guilty/liable/whatever of the alleged claims, and it wouldn't matter. If the statute of limitations has run, they're in the clear.
The only counter to an SOL defense is to try and claim that the SOL was paused for some reason, but those exceptions are very narrow and wouldn't apply here (and in the real world very rarely apply to civil cases).
Pretty sure it's the opposite: appeals mostly only work when the decision is not clear cut, and the statute of limitations is.
Aside from the disagreements between these parties, what about the precedent of running a non-profit, and then transferring all IP to a for profit when it’s convenient to do so?
I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.
This case sets no precedent one way or the other on that question. The IP was transferred to the for-profit for fair value in 2019, and Musk never argued otherwise in this case.
The attorneys general of California and Delaware could challenge that 2019 IP transfer if they so wished on behalf of the public.
Transactions like that happen all the time and are not problematic if handled legally. Any of the interested parties could have sued over it, but none have.
Because they got to participate in the early investment in the for profit entity.
> Early Angels (Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and others): Approximately $10 million invested, current value $1.4 billion. That corresponds to a return of around 140x.
https://www.trendingtopics.eu/openai-cap-table-leak/
Yeah. I wonder if the question "Did OpenAI steal a non-profit worth what is now maybe hundreds of billions of dollars?" will ever be answered. If not it will be one of the biggest heists in history.
The non-profit received shares in the for-profit as a result of the transfer. Those shares are theoretically worth hundreds of billions.
If it had been a for-profit company contributing assets to another for-profit company, the transaction would not have had any different tax consequence.
While none of the billionnaires on the stand came across as stellar paragons of virtue, it's hilarious that even they could not stand Elon.
That said, even though Altman is a shifty dude who's clearly playing a Game of Thrones while all others are playing Capitalism, I am extremely grateful that it's him running OpenAI and not Elon.
Seeing what Elon has done to Twitter, I shudder to think of what he'd do with ChatGPT. The level of reach and subtle influence he would have is insane. He could do with private chats what he's doing to public discourse, and it would all be invisible.
On the other hand, seeing what he's done with Grok, it's very likely OpenAI would be where xAI is and would never reach this level of adoption and influence. Which seems to be what most people at OpenAI were really worried about.
This was one trial where I didn’t want either side to win
And somehow I still feel worse off that Musk lost?
it was probably never about winning for Musk, but to leverage the legal system to air out some drama in open AI and some internal dialogue among the execs of the company for bad press.
The donation was also made through a donor advised fund (DAF), which means Musk didn't legally make the donation. I'm surprised he didn't lose on not having standing.
This should have been thrown away from the start, not sure why it saw a day in court. Musk himsrlf created xAi that is for profit. If he really is concerned about ai his own actions do not show that. This is just regret that he lost control of OpenAI, a trillion dollar company, and nothing more.
The lawsuit side, genuinely asking, how does the for-profit under non-profit setup work? What are the respective roles? Is the combination effectively a non-profit still? Or is this some kind of legal loophole to make profits under a non-profit?
Lots of non-profits use structures like that, it's not uncommon. Non-profit vs. for-profit is mostly a legal and accounting distinction; many laypeople confuse "non-profit" with "charity" and they are very different.
I hope he appeals. Not cheering for Musk, cheering for the fight.
It would just burn more cash unless he can somehow go back in time and change the facts.
Yes, and more burnt cash (and hopefully emotional energy) would be an acceptable outcome
Cross examination is one of the vanishingly few times you can see billionaires and executives act like human beings instead of sentient PR scripts.
There's nothing to appeal. Statute of limitations is... just that.
IANAL but civil statute of limitations is based on when the prosecuting party reasonably discovered they were wronged and had legal recourse, not when the event happened. It is entirely possible to debate when that was in this case.
For criminal cases at least, the statue of limitations is not set in stone. But probably for civil, its much more cut and dry.
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Annoying that it had to be Musk to take this fight, but isn't it very unfortunate that OpenAI is allowed to do this non-profit whoopsie we're now a for-profit thing?
Laws were broken?
Interesting how it played out. Curious will it somehow affect OpenAI business or XAi.
> A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations.
Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.
A dismissal on technical grounds, which is also a complete loss.
No, it's a complete loss. Much like in engineering, the law considers technical details to be extraordinarily important.
Who cares if the plaintiff or defendant won? The trial had great expository value regarding all the players involved.
This should clear the path to the IPO and lead to a VERY profitable payday for those holding OpenAI equity. Millionaires and billionaires will be minted ~one year from now.
You can hate Musk all you want but between him and Scam I'd pick Musk any day.
What they did to him was unfair, he put in all the money, office and initial push, he deserves a piece of the pie he created. This is quite unfair towards him.
So you are allowed to violate the law if you aren't sued quickly enough.
Yes. This has always been, and will always be, the case. It's the same in things like copyright law - you can violate any software license if the copyright holder doesn't know you're doing it, or doesn't want to sue you, or doesn't sue you in time. It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.
What Altman and Brockman did still seems highly unethical.
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Well, you're allowed to violate the contract if you aren't sued quickly enough. You're allowed to violate the law if you aren't prosecuted quickly enough (for some crimes).
I think a lot about how there's a very plausible alternate history where Elon Musk controls most of the frontier of AI.
I've thought about that, too, but it would require that all of the key individuals at OpenAI would have been willing to stay at OpenAI under his ownership.
That seems unlikely to me given how divisive he is. OpenAI already had one existential leadership crisis without Musk. I doubt it would have fair better under his notoriously difficult leadership. If he had wrestled control away, I would expect an exodus of employees going to new companies.
They're willing to work under the current snake, even got him back after he was removed, so why not musk?
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There but for the grace of god go we...
This is what he Grok hopes to become, but probably too late
Fifth place is fine, when the numbers and power in question are that large.
You speak as if Elon Musk didn't buy tons of AI chips for full self driving (Dojo) and COMPLETELY flub it.
It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.
Tesla wasn't "successful" before he "took it over" (read: invested most of their seed capital and ran the actual day-to-day operations).
SpaceX, founded entirely by him alone, is also the most valuable space technology company on earth, so...
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10 years returns S&P 500 (index of all those better than Musk): 261% Tesla: 2700%
Disclaimer: My portfolio is 65% Tesla.
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I absolute abhor the man but I think this is silly. No doubt that he has had luck and help, but he is still a good businessman. He's certainly an asshole (almost certainly dark triad territory), but I think that can be a benefit when creating a business.
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And how much worse things would be if that had come to pass?
why would he run Anthropic?
As I understand it, Anthropic exists in part as a quirk of how Dario Amodei's experience at OpenAI went. In the world where Musk controls OpenAI, I don't think you can assume Anthropic splinters off the same way (for overdetermined reasons! I'm not saying Musk is a better manager.)
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Musk may have lost round 1, but Musk has a HUGE pile of cash, and Open AI is a borrower from everybody and their brothers. Almost all the principle people left Open AI already.
That's misunderstanding the finances involved here. OpenAI is a privately held company; sure, that means they're "borrowing" from their investors technically. But that's in exactly the same sense that a public company is actually "owned" by its shareholders. The behavioral relationship goes the other way: people own bits of the company because they want it to do well and their share to grow in size, not because they expect the debt/dividend to be repaid per se.
In point of fact most valuations place OpenAI in the hundreds of billions of dollars already and growing rapidly.
Basically, no: OpenAI's pockets are deeper than Musks's personal wealth. Especially so considering that this suit is existentially important to them where Musk needs to maintain leverage for other efforts.
There won't be a round 2. It's over.
Advice for Elon: you can actually use ChatGPT on the web or the desktop app to schedule reminders for you, like "file lawsuit against OpenAI."
The consequences of relying on grok..
Did you not read the article at all? He had to do this in 2021, well before such GPT apps existed.
That's not what the article stated. The jury had to find that the harms occurred prior to certain dates in 2021, not that Musk had to file before then.
Both should be fined for wasting our time with fake-troll court cases.
Basically the title of the court case was: "Is Skynet slop going to be helpful to mankind".
We all know how that story ends. Thus, fining both is warranted. When the superrich go to court, they should pay an extra fee. Like a billion per court case or so.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20160220093339/https://openai.co...
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
> Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.
---
https://web.archive.org/web/20180323231344/https://openai.co...
> We publish at top machine learning conferences, open-source software tools for accelerating AI research, and release blog posts to communicate our research. We will not keep information private for private benefit, but in the long term, we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns.
---
It's about open research.
https://openai.com/research/index/
This was pretty much the quality of Elon's argumentation in court. Turns out "getting sick dunks" wins likes on Twitter, but it doesn't win lawsuits.
They have open models
lol
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He lost in the sense that he filed a lawsuit and that lawsuit was dismissed.
It seems like a reasonable way to use the word, no?
Obviously so.
You're either responding to an LLM or a badly malfunctioning human.
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Hmm, I wonder why the title of the article doesn’t say the lawsuit was dismissed or why.
I think it's fair to say the headline misleads, even if technically accurate. My initial read was that he had lost on the merits of the case, and not "jury rules Musk sued too late".
He can appeal if he wants to, but if he had a good argument for why the statute of limitations shouldn't apply, he would already have brought it up.
Odds of him winning on appeal are low.
Sure, losing is winning. I mean what are words anyway?
Yep. Headline is clickbait. Never bet against Elon.
Unless you're betting that a thing he has said will happen will actually happen when he said it would. Or even 10 years later.
Sam is just too good at this game and as I said before [0] is far worse than Elon and also outsmarted him.
Of course this will be appealed but, as you see the claims just don't stick.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651664
Why do you think Sam is worse than Elon?
Presumably better at being devious. Elon is sloppy...
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I’m not a Sam Altman fan, but I think it’s debatable if he’s worse than the guy who did a sieg heil at a political rally
Be more afraid of the technocrat who doesn't even have a tell. It means they are better at manipulation.
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He lost his trial. That is just the first phase of a lawsuit.
No, it's effectively over.
Ending a trial over a bureaucratic technicality is not good justice.
Statute of limitations is not a "bureaucratic technicality", it is the law.
I recognize the value of the statute of limitations, but it is a technicality, and unfortunately, the central legal questions of this case were not addressed.
Can some lawyer explain the rationale of statute of limitations? Like why does a robber get to get away with the crime if they are able to evade the police for x number of years. Is it just because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything?
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Then why did the American justice system needed nine jurors when a clerk could have sufficed?
The American judicial system is completely Byzantine and rotten, from top to bottom. Worse than many third world countries.
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It can be both
I am absolutely certain that if Sam was suing xAI and the case got dismissed on a technicality people would be lined up with screeds about the injustice of the situation.
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If you consider a statute of limitations to be a mere bureaucratic technicality, then you might as well say we shouldn't have the entire Anglo-American legal system.
Moreover, there is no "justice" here either way--it's just rich people suing each other.
The jury found against Musk - what exactly are you talking about?
Like any case involving legal matters, they are talking about things they deeply do not understand.
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It turns out 'stealing a charity' is strictly defined in California law as 'commercializing it with Microsoft instead of my car company.' Glad we finally got that clarified