Musk vs. OpenAI Trial Begins Today

According to a report from Bloomberg, Musk has withdrawn his fraud claims against OpenAI and its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman on the eve of the trial, significantly downsizing the lawsuit involving over $100 billion.

Last Friday, Federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers approved Musk's request to "streamline the case". Originally, the complaint filed in November 2024 contained 26 charges, now only two charges enter the jury trial stage - unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust.

The jury selection officially kicked off today at the Oakland Federal Court in California. The trial is expected to last for several weeks. The witness lineup spans the entire Silicon Valley power circle: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, early core figure Ilya Sutskever, and three former board members who briefly fired Altman in 2023 are all listed, and Musk's partner, former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis, will also appear in court.

The dispute dates back to 2015. When Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI, they promised to develop safe AI in a non-profit manner. In the complaint, Musk stated that this promise prompted him to donate a total of about $40 million. In 2018, Altman and Brockman refused to hand over control of the company to Musk, who then resigned from the board and withdrew financial support. Musk characterized this history as intentional deception, accusing the two of bypassing him to secretly promote commercialization, essentially turning OpenAI into a "subsidiary of Microsoft". He demanded more than $134 billion in compensation and asked the court to revoke the positions of Altman and Brockman, while restoring OpenAI's non-profit status.

OpenAI countered that Musk's lawsuit was nothing more than an attempt to use legal means to undermine a competitor when his own AI company xAI lagged behind. Court documents show that Musk himself proposed to merge OpenAI with Tesla in 2018, and his family office head Jared Birchall registered a for-profit entity called "Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies". "His own words and deeds have spoken everything," OpenAI wrote in the court documents.

The trial will be conducted in two stages. In the first stage, the jury will issue an advisory decision on the two charges of unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust, but the decision is not binding on the judge; in the second stage, Gonzalez Rogers will make a separate ruling on the relief measures sought by Musk.

The verdict of this case will directly affect the future direction of OpenAI. The company is moving towards the goal of an IPO within this year. If Musk wins the lawsuit, the listing plan will face a severe impact, and Altman's leadership position will be in jeopardy; if Musk loses the lawsuit, OpenAI will gain a clear legal endorsement to proceed at full speed with its data center expansion plan, which costs tens of billions of dollars.