Back in 2015, Elon Musk and Sam Altman sat side by side on stage in San Francisco. They were rolling out a new AI nonprofit called OpenAI.
This week, a jury in Oakland is deciding the big question. Did one of them steal the lab from the other?
Musk sued Altman, Greg Brockman and the lab in 2024.
His claim: they broke a promise to keep it a charity. Then they turned it into a for-profit now worth more than $850 billion.
The case says the founders broke their charity promise and got rich off it. The legal terms are breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment.
Closing arguments wrapped Thursday after three weeks in court. The jury started weighing the case Monday.
The jury's verdict is advisory. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will make the final call on liability.
Musk hit the same line he has pushed on X for years. He said he came up with the idea, the name, found the talent and paid the early bills.
Altman pushed back. He said nobody made promises to Musk about how the lab would be run.
He also said Musk wanted total control from day one. Musk pushed for as much as 90% ownership when the team first talked about a for-profit version.
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The fight traces back to 2017. Musk wanted total control and threatened to walk if he did not get it.
He ended his monthly checks around September 2017. All told, he paid about $38 million.
That was well short of the $1 billion he first promised.
Musk then made one last push to fold the lab into Tesla. The other co-founders said no.
The two went quiet on each other for years. Altman even kept praising Musk on Twitter.
That changed when the lab launched ChatGPT in late 2022. Then Microsoft put $10 billion into the company in January 2023.
Musk hit back by calling it a "closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft." Within weeks he started xAI as a direct rival.
This is not just a rich-guy spat. It lands at one of the most loaded moments in tech.
OpenAI is racing toward an IPO worth $850 billion. Musk's SpaceX, which merged with xAI in February, now sits at $1.25 trillion.
SpaceX could file its IPO papers as soon as this week. The deal could be a record offering next month.
A bad verdict could throw sand in the gears of those plans.
Stavros Gadinis, a UC Berkeley law professor, said it well in an email. "After weeks of damaging testimony, the public is left choosing between two dueling billionaires," he said.
He thinks most people will land on "neither."
If the jury sides with Musk, the lab's nonprofit story gets harder to sell to stock buyers.
If they side with Altman, Musk's years of X attacks lose their court punch.
A verdict could land any day this week.
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