May 16, 2026 · AI · Court · Musk v. Altman

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An Advisory Jury Will Decide on Monday Whether OpenAI Stole a Charity.

Closing arguments in Musk v. Altman concluded on May 14, 2026, in U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s Oakland courtroom. After three weeks of testimony and twelve years of public feud, the nine-person advisory jury — six women, three men — will begin deliberations on Monday, May 19. The judge has said she will “very likely follow” the jury’s advisory verdict. She is not bound to.

The witness list read like a tech-industry deposition slate. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, testified for roughly four hours on May 12 and was cross-examined on May 13. Greg Brockman followed on May 5. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, testified May 13 that Microsoft “feared being too dependent on OpenAI.” Former OpenAI board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, and former senior executives Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, testified that Altman had been less than candid with them. Elon Musk took the stand in late April; on closing-arguments day he was in China.

Two claims survived to trial out of the twenty-six Musk originally filed: breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment. The April 2026 amended complaint asks the court to order disgorgement of roughly $134,000,000,000 to $150,000,000,000to the OpenAI nonprofit — not to Musk personally — and to remove Altman and Brockman. No verdict has been issued. Every allegation discussed below remains, as of this writing, an allegation.

• 2claims leftbreach of charitable trust · unjust enrichment — 24 others dismissed May 1, 2025
• 9jurorsadvisory verdict, not binding; judge said she will “very likely follow”
• $134,000,000,000disgorgement (low)to the OpenAI nonprofit per the April 2026 amended complaint
• $150,000,000,000disgorgement (high)upper end of the amended-complaint demand; remedies phase begins May 19
• 0verdictsno liability ruling, no remedy, no appeal — yet

Musk filed in San Francisco Superior Court on Feb. 29, 2024, then re-filed in federal court (4:24-cv-04722) on Aug. 5, 2024 with a longer roster of claims: false advertising, breach of fiduciary duty, racketeering under RICO, antitrust violations against Microsoft, and securities violations among them. On May 1, 2025, Judge Gonzalez Rogers narrowed the case dramatically. Twenty-four of the twenty-six claims were dismissed. Two survived:

On March 4, 2025, in a 16-page order, Judge Gonzalez Rogers had already denied Musk’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block OpenAI’s for-profit conversion, ruling that Musk “had not cleared the high bar” required. OpenAI completed its recapitalization in October 2025: it is now a Public Benefit Corporation, with the original nonprofit retaining a roughly 26 percent stake. The California and Delaware attorneys general issued no-objection statements, with conditions, before the conversion closed.

Musk testified during the first week of trial, beginning April 28, 2026. The plaintiff’s opening, delivered by trial lead Steven Molo of MoloLamken, framed the case in five words that became the trial’s editorial shorthand: OpenAI “stole a charity.” Musk testified that he had been misled about the entity’s long-term structure when he donated, on his account, approximately $38,000,000 between 2015 and 2017. (Some filings cite ~$44,000,000across a 2016–2020 window.)

“I was a fool who provided them free funding to create a startup.”

Elon Musk · trial testimony · April 2026 · as reported by CNBC and MIT Technology Review

Musk also testified about a 2018-era text message to Altman: “What the hell is going on? This is a bait and switch.” And on the broader stakes of AI development, Musk testified that “the worst-case scenario is a Terminator situation where AI kills us all” — a line Judge Gonzalez Rogers pointedly rejected as the frame for what was happening in her courtroom. Joshua Achiam, currently OpenAI’s Chief Futurist, testified during the plaintiff’s case that Musk had called him a “jackass” in 2018 for raising AI-safety concerns inside OpenAI — testimony OpenAI’s counsel would later use to argue that Musk’s present-day safety framing is inconsistent with his contemporaneous behavior.

“This is not a trial on whether or not artificial intelligence has damaged humanity.”

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers · bench statement · as reported by MIT Technology Review

On the question of whether Musk’s xAI — the for-profit AI company he founded in March 2023 — trades on the same architectures it accuses OpenAI of converting, Musk acknowledged at trial that xAI’s Grok models had been trained in part by “distilling” outputs from OpenAI’s public APIs. That admission is reported in MIT Technology Review’s Week 1 trial recap. OpenAI’s counsel returned to it in closing.

Altman took the stand on May 12, 2026 for roughly four hours and was cross-examined on May 13. His framing inverted Molo’s opening line. The trial-record version, as reported by CNBC:

“He didn't steal a charity, but Elon Musk abandoned one.”

Sam Altman · trial testimony · May 12, 2026 · CNBC, MIT Technology Review

Altman also testified, according to Al Jazeera’s coverage of the May 12 session, that Musk had attempted to negotiate majority equity in the early structure he is now suing to preserve:

“An early number that Mr. Musk threw out was that he should have 90 percent of the equity to start.”

Sam Altman · trial testimony · May 12, 2026 · as reported by Al Jazeera

Altman testified that Musk “did try to kill” OpenAI when his preferred ownership and control terms were rejected in 2018, and left the board afterward — precisely the point at which, on Altman’s telling, Musk “abandoned” the charitable organization Musk now alleges was stolen from him.

Corroborating witnesses for the defense framed Altman’s candor as the case’s most contested fact. Former OpenAI board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, who had supported the November 2023 board move that briefly removed Altman, testified that Altman had lied to them about internal matters. Former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and former chief technology officer Mira Murati — both OpenAI co-founders — offered similar testimony. AI-safety researcher Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley) testified as an expert for Musk on AGI-safety norms.

“I suspect there's plenty of people who don't want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk's hands.”

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers · bench statement · as reported by MIT Technology Review

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella testified on May 13, 2026. The original federal complaint had named Microsoft as a co-defendant on antitrust and RICO theories. Those claims were dismissed in May 2025. Microsoft remains a witness, not a defendant. Nadella’s testimony, as reported by CNBC and Bloomberg Law, leaned away from the picture Musk had drawn of an OpenAI-Microsoft cartel: Microsoft, Nadella testified, “feared being too dependent” on OpenAI and pursued diversification — including its own internal models and competing partnerships — precisely because the dependency Musk alleges was, in Microsoft’s view, a strategic risk.

The dollar figures running through Musk v. Altmanspan five orders of magnitude. Musk’s alleged donations in the mid-2010s are dwarfed by the disgorgement his amended complaint now seeks; the company at the center of the case is now worth roughly a hundred times Musk’s rejected 2025 nonprofit-parent offer.

Two figures matter most for what comes next. The $134,000,000,000 to $150,000,000,000 disgorgement demand defines the remedies-phase ceiling — the maximum dollar exposure if Musk prevails on both surviving claims and the court grants full equitable relief. The ~26 percentnonprofit stake retained after October 2025’s recapitalization defines the floor — the equity through which any disgorgement would actually flow back to the original charitable mission. The trial is not over, and no figure between those two has been adjudicated.

On Feb. 10, 2025, a Musk-led consortium offered $97,400,000,000 for OpenAI’s nonprofit parent. On Feb. 14, the board — chaired by Bret Taylor — rejected the bid unanimously: “OpenAI is not for sale.” Altman’s response on X, the same day:

The dollar amount — $9,740,000,000 — was the punch line: Altman quoting an apparent half-of-half-price valuation of Musk’s X platform against Musk’s own $97,400,000,000 offer. Musk replied within hours with the language he has used about Altman publicly ever since:

Musk has also called Altman a “swindler” on the platform. None of these posts is a legal exhibit. Both lawyers were emphatic, in opening and closing, that the courtroom is not X.

Three contemporaneous video accounts of the closing-arguments day, May 14, 2026:

Two facts about the case’s final weeks did not appear in the witness box but are now part of the record. First, a court filing reported by CNN on May 4, 2026— days before opening arguments — revealed that Musk had sought to settle with OpenAI in the immediate run-up to trial. OpenAI declined. The disgorgement figures in the amended complaint, on this telling, are not a maximalist negotiating posture; they are the relief Musk asked the court to enter after settlement talks failed.

Second, on the day of closing arguments — the most consequential day of the trial — Musk was in China. Marc Toberoff, his press counsel, apologized to the court for the absence. Judge Gonzalez Rogers noted, on the record, that she could recall him if needed. (Source: CNBC, May 14, 2026.) Steven Molo delivered the plaintiff’s closing without him.

The mechanics of an advisory jury are unusual enough to be worth stating in full. In an equitable case — and breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment are both equitable in nature — the right to a jury verdict is not constitutionally guaranteed. The judge sits as fact-finder. Here, Judge Gonzalez Rogers chose to seat a jury anyway, in an advisory capacity. The jury will return findings; the judge then issues a binding ruling that may, but need not, track those findings.

None of this is a verdict. The defendants are entitled to the presumption that has carried them this far: that the surviving claims are claims, that the testimony summarized above is testimony, and that nothing in the trial record has yet been adjudicated against them.