Elon Musk Rages Against OpenAI $150B Trial Judge, Promises Appeal

“There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity,” a big bucks court losing Elon Musk stamped his feet and proclaimed today of his now estranged OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Tossing in a Trump caps, the world’s sometimes richest man added: “The only question is WHEN they did it!”

Just a couple of hours after a federal jury and judge rebutted Musk’s 2024 filed breach of charitable trust claim and unlawfully enriched claim against the OpenAI CEO and president (as well as Microsoft), the X owner went on his social media platform to decry the results.

Clearly P.O.’d by the nine-juror panel and Oakland-based Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers emphasizing the statute of limitations to blunt his desires to take back control of the home of ChatGPT, fire Altman and Brockman and more, Musk blamed everyone else and backed up his lawyers promises of an appeal.

“This illustrates why the ruling by the terrible activist Oakland judge, who simply used the jury as a fig leaf, creates such a terrible precedent,” Musk tweeted. “She just handed out a free license to loot charities if you can keep the looting quiet for a few years!”

Viewing the statue of limitations as some how unfair and staying on brand that the rules shouldn’t apply to him, Musk followed that up with: “Regarding the OpenAI case, the judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality.”

“There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity,” he went on in a second tweet, repeating his core accusation that Altman and gang were pirates on the data seas when the open a for-profit portion of OpenAI in 2019. “The only question is WHEN they did it!”

Formed in 2015 by Musk (who put in $50 million, left in 2018), Altman and Brockman, OpenAI has been working for months on a widely anticipated $1 trillion IPO that could bust Wall Street records. Musk’s 2024 lawsuit and the three-week trial that it spawned had a real possibility of derailing that colossal stock offering. Now, the legal leather restraining straps are off — and Elon knows it.

“I will be filing an appeal with the Ninth Circuit, because creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America,” the litigious billionaire wrote, hoping to get around a promised appeal refusal from Judge Gonzalez Rogers. “OpenAI was founded to benefit all of humanity.”

Perhaps, but as the founder of his own AI company, recent Trump China trip tagalong Musk knows it ain’t that straightforward anymore.

Musk also knows, or should know, that, as much as he hates Altman and the sums he stands to make, on an increasingly crowded landscape with Anthropic, Perplexity AI, Google‘s efforts, the legions of companies out of China and significant OpenAI ownership stakeholders MicroSoft, humanity has a lot of benefits and risks out there in its digital future.