Jury selection begins Monday in a high-profile trial between Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, and OpenAI, a company he once supported and that has since become a major AI competitor. The case centers on Musk’s claim that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman misled him in 2015, portraying the startup as a nonprofit whose technology ‘would belong to the world’ and inducing him to invest millions. Musk says he later left the organization after it created a commercial arm to raise money for data centers and large-scale development.
At the heart of the lawsuit is an allegation that Altman misrepresented OpenAI’s mission as purely altruistic. Musk is asking the court to force OpenAI to revert to nonprofit status and to remove Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman. He initially sought up to $134 billion in damages but has said he will donate any recovery to the OpenAI nonprofit.
OpenAI operates under a hybrid model in which a nonprofit foundation supervises a for-profit entity. Backed by billions from Microsoft, the company is now valued at roughly $852 billion. Observers say the suit touches on broader debates about how AI should be developed and used, amid concerns about job displacement and potential existential risks, but many also view it as a personal and commercial rivalry between prominent tech figures.
OpenAI’s flagship product, ChatGPT, competes directly with Grok, a chatbot launched in 2023 by Musk’s xAI lab. OpenAI has argued that Musk’s exit reflected a desire for control rather than principled objections to the organization’s structure, and on X described the lawsuit as a harassment campaign driven by ego, jealousy and an attempt to slow a competitor. A ruling in the case is expected by mid-May.