OAKLAND, California – A federal jury has comprehensively rejected tech billionaire Elon Musk’s high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI, its Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, and President Greg Brockman, clearing the artificial intelligence firm of all liability.
Okay News reports that the nine-person jury in Oakland, California, reached a unanimous verdict on Monday, May 18, 2026, after less than two hours of deliberation. The jury determined that Musk had waited far too long to file his claims, meaning the statute of limitations had completely expired on his allegations that the ChatGPT-maker breached its founding foundational agreements.
The swift verdict caps off a dramatic, three-week trial that offered a rare, unvarnished look behind the scenes of Silicon Valley’s most powerful entities. Musk’s legal team argued that Altman had “stolen a charity” by shifting OpenAI from its original, 2015 non-profit mission to a massively lucrative, for-profit structure backed by tens of billions of dollars from Microsoft. On the stand, Musk claimed he was deceived into donating $38 million under the premise that the technology would be developed strictly for the benefit of humanity. OpenAI’s defense successfully countered that Musk was well aware of the for-profit trajectory as early as 2017 and only filed the 2024 lawsuit out of “jealousy” after his own 2018 bid to take unilateral control of the startup was rejected by the co-founders.
While the jury’s finding served in an advisory capacity, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately accepted the verdict as the court’s own, formally throwing out the multibillion-dollar case on the spot. “I think there’s a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss on the spot,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers stated. Representatives for OpenAI hailed the outcome as a “tremendous victory for the justice system,” clearing a definitive regulatory path as the firm targets a historic initial public offering (IPO) later this year at a projected $1 trillion valuation. Musk’s lead attorneys, however, remained defiant outside the courthouse, stating that they fully intend to preserve their right to appeal, ensuring the bitter tech feud is far from over.
