Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI | TechCrunch
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AI
Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI
Tim Fernholz
10:34 AM PDT · May 18, 2026
Elon Musk’s claim that he was mistreated by his OpenAI cofounders failed after nine California jurors decided in a unanimous verdict that his lawsuits had been filed too late.
Musk had accused Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI and Microsoft of "stealing a charity" by creating a for-profit affiliate to the frontier AI lab.
Jurors, however, found that any harms that Musk suffered came before the deadline for filing his claims under the law.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Topics
AI, Elon Musk, OpenAI trial, TC
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Tim Fernholz
Senior Reporter
Tim Fernholz is a journalist who writes about technology, finance and public policy. He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a senior reporter at Quartz, the global business news site, for more than a decade, and began his career as a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing tim.fernholz@techcrunch.com or via an encrypted message to tim_fernholz.21 on Signal.
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