OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 by Musk and a group of researchers Objective Developing AI for the benefit of humanity, beyond the need to generate financial returns. Musk donated $38 million to the company in its early days, reportedly on the basis that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman had promised to keep the company a nonprofit committed to the mission.
Musk presented two claims against OpenAI. First, they argued that Altman and Brockman breached the charitable trust they had created through their donations by breaking their promise to keep the company non-profit and creating a subsidiary with growing profits over the years. Second, they argued that Altman and Brockman unjustly enriched themselves at Musk’s expense. He sued OpenAI in 2024.
Musk asked the court to void the 2025 reorganization, which turned OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary into a public benefit corporation and removed Altman and Brockman from their roles.
OpenAI argued that the time for Musk to sue the company had already expired before he brought the case. The statute of limitations on a breach of charitable trust claim is three years, while the statute of limitations on an unjust enrichment claim is two years. This means that Musk’s alleged violations of Altman and Brockman’s charitable trust should not have been discovered before 2021, or their alleged unjust enrichment should not have been discovered before 2022.
While Musk argued that he learned that Altman and Brockman had broken their promise only in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Musk had reason to think about this before 2021.
Musk told the jury that he went through “three stages” in his beliefs about OpenAI: In the first stage, he was “enthusiastically supportive” of the company. In the second phase, “I started to lose confidence that they were telling me the truth,” he said. Step three, “I’m sure they’re robbing a non-profit.”
Here’s an in-depth look at the timeline of events as testimony is given at the trial. You can read my dispatches from all three weeks of testing here and here and here.
2017: Musk proposes creating a profitable subsidiary
In 2017, two years after OpenAI was founded, Musk and other co-founders tried to form a profitable subsidiary to raise enough capital to create artificial general intelligence—powerful AI that could compete with humans at most cognitive tasks. They fought a bitter power struggle over who would control the unit. Musk also proposed merging OpenAI with his electric-car company Tesla.
