Frequently asked questions
Why is Elon Musk suing OpenAI ?
Who are the protagonists who testified during this trial ?
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On April 27, 2026, a jury of nine ordinary citizens sat down facing one of the most incongruous questions in recent judicial history: Who should Elon Musk or Sam Altman believe? Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who presides over the federal court in Oakland, put it bluntly herself.
This shows how this trial, which was supposed to resolve legal questions about the governance of a foundation, quickly took on the appearance of settling scores between two irreconcilable visions of what artificial intelligence should be.
The story began in 2015, in an atmosphere of philanthropy, Sam Altman convinced Elon Musk to co-found OpenAI with him.
The promise is that of a non-profit laboratory, whose technology would belong to the whole world, Musk invests 38 million dollars and ten years later, the structure he helped launch is valued at 852 billion dollars and is preparing to go public.
This chasm between stated intention and commercial reality is precisely what Musk is accusing his former partners in court in Oakland.
For him, OpenAI is no longer the promised charitable organization, but it is a financial machine that Sam Altman would have embezzled for private purposes, with the complicity of Microsoft, his first historical investor with 13 billion dollars committed since 2019.
What was the most unexpected thing the trial produced was a mass of internal communications made public by the proceedings, emails, text messages, excerpts from private diaries: the backstage of OpenAI was displayed before the eyes of the jury as they had never been before.
Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Greg Brockman, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, and Ilya Sutskever, one of the architects of ChatGPT, all testified, for three weeks, that these five of the most powerful men in the global technology sector had to defend, under oath, their version of events.
That of Greg Brockman is particularly embarrassing, while Altman publicly affirmed in 2017 that the non-profit status would be maintained, his co-founder wrote in his journal: “If in three months we create a commercial company, then that would be a lie.” A few months later, the commercial subsidiary was created.
On Musk's side, the revelations are no less embarrassing, Altman told the court that in 2018, Musk suggested that OpenAI should be passed on to his own children if he died, “we were not comfortable with this idea,” Altman simply said.
He also mentioned an attempt by Musk to bring AI development back to Tesla, along with what he perceived as a threat: leaving OpenAI to its fate in case of refusal.
The final pleadings, delivered on May 15, were up to the promise of the spectacle, Musk's lawyer, Steven Molo, ironized before the jurors about OpenAI's original mission: “A non-profit organization dedicated to the safe development of AI whose code will be made public for the good of humanity... we are trying to make us swallow that”, his metaphor for the bank robbery hit “If you take $100 million, it's not a defense to say you left ten in the safe.”
OpenAI lawyer William Savitt replied on the same note, “Have we ever heard of a robbery where thieves invented banking and deposited 200 billion dollars in it?”
Musk's personal credibility has also taken a hit, an OpenAI lawyer pointed out that even Shivon Zilis, his collaborator and mother of four of his children, who had served on the OpenAI board until 2023, did not corroborate his version, by SMS, she asked him in 2018 if she should remain “close and friendly” to OpenAI “so that the information continues to flow”, a detail that says a lot about the influence games that surrounded the foundation.
While his lawyers were pleading in Oakland, Elon Musk was in China with Donald Trump.
This absence says something about the state of the case: the person who presented himself at the opening of the trial as a protector of humanity approaches the deliberations from a position of weakness, the judge has reduced the scope of her grievances, limited the role of the jury to an advisory opinion, and reserves the right to determine any remedies herself.
What Musk is actually demanding is the return of OpenAI to its foundation status, which would mechanically block its listing on the stock market and force its investors, Microsoft, Amazon, Softbank, to review their position and the judge will also have to decide on the question Microsoft, did the Redmond giant knowingly facilitate OpenAI's commercial drift by committing 13 billion dollars to it?
The OpenAI Foundation, which controls about 25% of the commercial structure, had distributed only 7.6 million dollars in donations in 2024; it announced one billion for 2026, precisely one month before the start of the trial, and a timetable that its detractors did not fail to note.
The jury is withdrawing to deliberate starting on May 18, but basically the real question this trial poses is not “who was right between Musk and Altman in 2015?” , it's another, more uncomfortable one: who owns a technology capable of changing everything, when those who built it no longer even agree on what they had decided together?
