Elon Musk’s high-profile fight with OpenAI is going to a jury.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has ruled that there’s enough evidence to support Musk’s claims that OpenAI’s leadership assured him the organization would stick to its original nonprofit structure. A jury trial is tentatively set for March, putting one of the most influential AI labs under a very public legal microscope.
Musk sued OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024. He alleges they violated early contractual agreements by pivoting toward profit, rather than the founding mission of building AI that “benefits humanity” as a nonprofit.
Musk isn’t an outside critic here. He was an early financial backer and a co-founder of OpenAI, and says he put in about $38 million in the early days, plus guidance and reputational backing, based on assurances the organization would remain a nonprofit. He left OpenAI’s board in 2018 after other co-founders rejected his proposal to take over as CEO and chose Altman instead. Officially, Musk cited potential conflicts of interest with Tesla’s AI work on self-driving.
Since then, Musk has become one of OpenAI’s loudest opponents — while launching his own for-profit AI venture, xAI. In February 2025, he even made an unsolicited $97.4 billion offer to buy OpenAI, a bid Altman rejected.
OpenAI itself has gone through a complex evolution. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, it began moving away from a pure nonprofit structure in 2019, creating a for-profit subsidiary with a “capped-profit” model to attract the massive capital and talent needed to scale. In October 2025, the organization completed a formal restructuring: the for-profit arm became a Public Benefit Corporation, and the original nonprofit retained a 26% equity stake.
Musk is now seeking monetary damages tied to what he calls OpenAI’s “ill-gotten gains.” He argues that the value created after the shift to a profit-seeking structure is built on commitments that were never supposed to change.
OpenAI is pushing back hard. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that Musk’s lawsuit is “baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment.” The company has continued to double down on its hybrid nonprofit / PBC structure even as regulatory and political scrutiny of frontier AI intensifies.
The March jury trial will do more than settle a dispute between a billionaire co-founder and the company he helped launch. It will also test, in front of the public, how much legal weight early mission-driven commitments carry once an AI lab starts taking on billions in capital — and whether a jury believes OpenAI crossed a line when it rewired its governance for growth.
