Original editor: Moses Peach

Source: Xinzhiyuan

Just now, the grand finale of the Silicon Valley century trial has arrived!

Elon Musk's $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI was unanimously dismissed by the jury in less than two hours.

All charges were rejected without exception.

The sole reason for completely crushing this lawsuit is simple: Musk filed too late, the statute of limitations had expired...

This might be the most absurd courtroom scene of 2026.

Before this, it had been a massive tug-of-war —

Three weeks of trial, 11 days of testimonies, and dozens of Silicon Valley bigwigs taking turns on stage, with hundreds of pages of private emails, texts, and diaries turned inside out.

However, just when everyone was holding their breath, the jury promptly and cleanly put an end to the proceedings.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers publicly stated that she fully agreed with the jury's conclusion.

Once the verdict was announced, the internet exploded. Countless netizens expressed confusion: Was the past three weeks of dramatic court hearings merely a farce?

In response, a dissatisfied Musk posted again —

The actions of Altman and Greg Brockman are nothing but stealing from a charity for personal gain.

The next step is to continue the appeal.

The lawsuit of the century against OpenAI, with all three men absent

At 8:30 AM on Monday, the jury began closed discussions.

At 10:23 AM Pacific Time, court clerk Edwin Cuenco handed a note to the judge.

The judge announced, "The verdict is in."

It took 90 minutes from discussion to verdict.

This speed is absurdly fast. Musk alone sat on the witness stand for three days.

Brockman testified for five hours.

The massive amount of evidence and testimonies accumulated over three weeks was essentially glanced at by the jury before they made their decision.

Even more surreal, at the moment of the verdict, the three main figures of this epic battle — Musk, Altman, and Brockman, were all absent from the courtroom.

A $150 billion lawsuit verdict was declared with the plaintiff and defendant both collectively absent.

On the other hand, the legal teams from both sides expressed plenty of emotions.

During the brief recess following the verdict announcement, lawyers from OpenAI and Microsoft hugged and patted each other on the back in the courthouse hallway to celebrate.

Musk's chief lawyer, Marc Toberoff, walked out of the courthouse doors and faced a swarm of reporters, only to drop two words.

"Appeal."

Musk lost to time

The reasoning of the jury's verdict is actually quite simple.

California law states that the statute of limitations for violations of charitable trusts is "three years," and for unjust enrichment, it is two years.

OpenAI's lawyers proved a key fact. Musk had known about OpenAI's transition to profit since 2021.

He himself had texted Altman, stating, "I am really uneasy to see OpenAI has a $20 billion valuation," "This is just putting up a false front."

That was from late 2022 to early 2023. But Musk did not file the lawsuit until February 2024.

The jury found that the statute of limitations had expired, and the lawsuit was filed too late.

Musk's explanation in court was that he had always believed Altman's assurances, and it wasn't until Microsoft's $10 billion investment was finalized in 2023 that he realized "the profit-making arms were wagging the dog."

"Thinking someone might steal your car is not the same as someone actually stealing it," Musk said from the witness stand.

"If I had known earlier that they had stolen the charitable organization, I would have sued much sooner."

But the jury was not convinced.

Due to this procedural hurdle of the statute of limitations, the jury did not even enter into substantive deliberations.

In other words, none of the three core charges Musk filed — "violation of charitable trust," "unjust enrichment," "Microsoft's complicity" — were formally discussed.

All those explosive testimonies, astounding figures, and dramatic turnarounds, legally, amounted to nothing.

On the night of the mansion party, OpenAI embraced profitability

Although the jury did not deliberate on substantive allegations, the lengthy three-week trial has already laid bare OpenAI's most secret internal operations over the past 11 years.

Some of the details were even unheard of by the old gossipers of Silicon Valley.

In the summer of 2017, OpenAI's AI defeated the world's top players in Dota 2.

Musk immediately sent an email: "It's time to take the next step. This is a trigger event."

He called the core team to his 16,000-square-foot mansion in the South Bay, affectionately referred to as the "haunted house" by insiders.

Brockman recalled in his testimony that upon entering, he saw the floor littered with colorful paper scraps and plastic cups left over from the previous night's party.

In the living room left over from this party, the discussion of OpenAI's path toward profitability officially began.

Musk's lawyer, Steven Molo, displayed Brockman's electronic diary on the courtroom's big screen. One entry written during the negotiations stated: "What can get me to a billion dollars?"

Another entry written in November 2017 said: "Transitioning to B Corp without him (Musk) would be morally bankrupt."

Nine years later, he sits atop a $30 billion equity stake while undergoing cross-examination.

court evidence also unveiled other hidden narratives —

Musk and Zuckerberg exchanged texts discussing a joint acquisition of OpenAI;

OpenAI considered seriously funding through cryptocurrency in its early days. From crypto to Microsoft’s $13 billion, this funding route itself is a microcosm of an era.

This trial could be shot as a documentary, but the jury flipped the page in just 90 minutes.

The trillion-dollar IPO is about to begin, the finals have no pause button

After the trial, OpenAI's lawyer Savitt told reporters —

OpenAI is a nonprofit mission-driven organization, has been so in the past, and will continue to be so in the future.

Microsoft also quickly released a statement: "The facts and timeline of this case have been clear for a long time, and we welcome the jury's dismissal of these charges on the grounds of exceeding the statute of limitations."

Although OpenAI won, the victory was not glorious.

The revelations that surfaced during the three-week trial —

Brockman cashing out $30 billion at zero cost, Altman lying on safety approvals, Cerebras related transactions, Ilya's 52 pages of evidence, Murati's allegations of "chaos and mistrust" — these contents will not vanish from the public memory just because the "statute of limitations has expired."

When Altman was asked on the witness stand, "Are you fully trustworthy?" he couldn't even say a straightforward "yes."

But the greatest impact of this judgment is that it cleared the largest legal obstacle on OpenAI’s path to IPO.

The ultimate showdown of ASI is imminent

In March of this year, OpenAI just completed a $122 billion financing round, with a valuation of $852 billion.

The 2025 profit-making restructuring was not overturned, Microsoft’s cooperation exceeding $100 billion was not canceled, and Altman and Brockman were not removed from the management team. The path to a trillion-dollar IPO is now clear.

What supports this sky-high valuation is OpenAI’s real trump card:

GPT-5.5 was just released in April, focusing on completing complex tasks independently without human guidance, from writing code to data analysis in one go.

In terms of computing power, Altman is betting on traditional pathways, pouring money into cloud computing.

The scale of computing power procurement has already ballooned to around $600 billion, spanning five cloud providers including Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and AWS.

On Musk’s side, SpaceX secretly submitted an IPO application in April, and its valuation has reached $12.5 trillion after merging with xAI, with the prospectus expected to be made public as early as this week.

In terms of models, they have taken a more aggressive route: training seven large models simultaneously, burning about $1 billion a month.

From Grok 4.4 to the entire series of Grok 5, where the parameter scale of Grok 5 is several times that of GPT-5.5, all running on Colossus 2.

But what’s even more intriguing is a detail: In early May of this year, Colossus 2 signed a power contract with Anthropic, and began selling computing power externally.

This means Musk is not only building models; he is also becoming an arms dealer in the age of AI —

training his own models while selling computing power to competitors. This kind of strategy has almost no precedent in tech history.

Now, the two individuals who once co-founded OpenAI are each racing toward their respective trillion-dollar IPOs.

But the lawsuit is not really over.

Musk's lawyers have explicitly reserved the right to appeal, although the judge's stance makes the hope for a reversal slim.

More importantly, this is just one of many fronts —

xAI’s antitrust lawsuits against OpenAI and Apple, xAI’s lawsuits against OpenAI for misappropriation of trade secrets, and OpenAI's counterclaims against Musk are all still ongoing.

The legacy of this trial lies not in the judgment itself.

For the first time, it brought the most critical governance issues in the AI industry to federal court, with the entire world watching.

On the road to ASI, trust and safety issues will not disappear with a mere judgment.

As for Musk, the next episode of "appeal" is not finished yet.

References:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-18/elon-musk-loses-case-against-sam-altman-to-force-openai-overhaul

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/musk-altman-openai-trial-verdict.html

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/elon-musk-loses-lawsuit-against-openai-2026-05-18/

https://www.wired.com/story/musk-v-altman-jury-verdict/

https://nypost.com/2026/05/18/business/elon-musk-loses-lawsuit-against-openai-in-unanimous-verdict/

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