A federal jury has tossed out Elon Musk’s high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and its boss Sam Altman.
The nine-person jury unanimously found that Mr Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit and missed the deadline for the statute of limitations.
Mr Musk, the world’s richest man, was a co-founder of OpenAI, the company that launched in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT.
After investing $38 million in its first years, Mr Musk accused OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his top deputy of shifting into a moneymaking mode behind his back.
The nine-person jury found that Mr Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit and missed the deadline for the statute of limitations. The jury had deliberated only two hours. The jury served in an advisory role, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the verdict Monday as the court’s own and dismissed Mr Musk’s claims.
The three-week trial in Oakland, California shed light on the bitter falling-out between the two Silicon Valley titans and the beginnings of OpenAI, now a company valued at $852 billion and moving toward potentially one of the largest initial public offerings in history.
Altman and OpenAI claimed there was never a promise to keep OpenAI a nonprofit forever. In fact, they argued, Mr Musk knew this and filed his lawsuit because he couldn’t have unilateral control over the fast-growing AI developer. Mr Musk was seeking damages to be paid to the altruistic efforts of OpenAI’s charitable arm as well as Altman’s ouster from OpenAI’s board.
“I think they’re going to try to make this lawsuit … very complicated, but it’s actually very simple. Mr Musk said. “Which is that it’s not OK to steal a charity,” he added. Mr Musk’s lawsuit claimed that, in addition to “breach of charitable trust,” Altman and Brockman unjustly enriched themselves from the windfall as the ChatGPT maker soared in valuation.
OpenAI has brushed off Musk’s allegations as an unfounded case. Mr Altman and Mr Musk both vied to be OpenAI’s CEO in its early years. In his testimony, Altman said he had concerns about Musk’s attempts to gain more control over OpenAI, which was aiming to safely build a better-than-human form of AI called artificial general intelligence.
“Part of the reason we started OpenAI is we didn’t think AGI could be under the control of any one person, no matter how good their intents are,” Altman said.
