Elon Musk’s $134 billion lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman and Microsoft will go to trial Monday in federal court in Oakland, California, after the billionaire dropped his fraud allegations days before jury selection.
U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted Musk’s request on Friday to narrow the scope of the case from the original 26 claims to two remaining counts of unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust.
Experimental years in preparation
Musk filed a lawsuit in November 2024 after donating about $38 million in seed funding to OpenAI. It was launched as a non-profit research laboratory in 2015.
He claims that Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman urged this support with explicit promises that the organization would never pursue commercial profit.
OpenAI was later restructured into a for-profit entity and accepted more than $13 billion from Microsoft. Musk says this shift has led to the enrichment of insiders at the expense of… Early donors And the public mission they were told they were funding.
In February 2025, Musk led a $97.4 billion consortium An attempt to take control of the non-profit arm of OpenAI. Altman publicly rejected the offer.
What will the jury decide?
The trial examines whether OpenAI and Microsoft were unjustly enriched by the company’s shift to a for-profit model. It also focuses on whether OpenAI has violated the terms of its original charitable mission. The second allegation accuses Microsoft of aiding and abetting.
If Elon Musk wins, his lawyers have asked that any payouts flow to OpenAI’s charitable arm rather than to him personally.
Musk is separately pursuing an antitrust case against Apple and OpenAI and continues to do so Developing XAI as a direct competitor to Altman.
Jury selection begins Monday morning before Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who previously presided over Epic Games’ antitrust case against Apple. The proceedings are expected to reveal internal communications between Musk, Altman and Brockman from the early years of OpenAI.
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