Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman: The Trial That Could Reshape OpenAI

After years of legal sparring, Elon Musk and Sam Altman are finally taking their fight to a courtroom in Northern California this week. The stakes couldn’t be higher: OpenAI’s IPO is on the horizon, and the court could rule on whether the company even gets to exist as a for-profit enterprise. It might also boot Altman and his leadership team out the door.

Musk is suing OpenAI, claiming Altman and president Greg Brockman tricked him into funding the company in its early days. The pitch was simple: keep it a nonprofit, build AI for humanity, no profit motive. Musk says they promised that, then quietly pivoted to a for-profit structure once they had his money and credibility. He left in 2018 after a messy power struggle, and now he wants $134 billion in damages from both OpenAI and Microsoft. He’s also asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman and restore OpenAI to its original nonprofit form. Interestingly, he’s not asking for the damages to go to him personally—he wants them awarded to OpenAI’s nonprofit arm.

Nine jurors will deliver an advisory verdict, which is non-binding but will guide the judge’s decision. Musk, Altman, and Brockman will all take the stand. So will former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, former CTO Mira Murati, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Expect cringey texts, raw diary entries, and endless scheming to come to light. For an industry that usually operates in secret, this trial is a rare chance to peek behind the curtain.

What’s the fight really about?

When OpenAI was founded in 2015, it was a nonprofit backed by a $38 million donation from Musk. The promise was open-source technology for the public good, no financial returns required. But over time, the company started arguing that competition made it dangerous to share too much, and that a nonprofit couldn’t raise enough money to keep up. (MIT Technology Review was first to report on OpenAI’s internal conflicts around this mission shift.)

The court has already found that in 2017, Altman and Brockman wanted to set up a for-profit arm, while Musk proposed merging OpenAI with Tesla. When Musk threatened to stop funding, Altman and Brockman told him they were committed to staying nonprofit. Musk alleges they pursued the for-profit pivot anyway, without telling him. OpenAI’s version is that Musk agreed a for-profit entity was necessary and even wanted to be its CEO.

But even if Musk proves he was deceived, legal scholars are scratching their heads over whether he even has standing to sue. “The idea that Elon Musk can sue because he was a donor or used to be on the board is pretty puzzling,” says Jill Horwitz, a nonprofit law professor at Northwestern. “Typically, it’s up to the attorneys general to bring such a claim.” And that already happened: in October 2025, the attorneys general of California and Delaware struck a deal with OpenAI to approve its new corporate structure, with conditions like a safety committee to review for-profit decisions. Critics, including Musk, safety advocates, and civil society groups, have tried to stop it, but California’s AG declined to join Musk’s lawsuit, saying it didn’t serve the public interest.

The bigger picture

This trial isn’t just about OpenAI. It’s about the tension between idealism and capitalism in AI development. Musk, despite his own for-profit empire, is positioning himself as the defender of open-source, public-benefit AI. Altman and OpenAI argue that without profit, they can’t compete with Google, Meta, and the rest. Both sides have a point, but neither is exactly a saint.

What’s likely to emerge from the trial is a messy, human story of ambition, ego, and shifting loyalties. The public will get to see how decisions were made, who knew what, and when. That’s valuable, even if the legal outcome is uncertain. I expect the trial to reveal that both Musk and Altman were willing to bend the mission when it suited them. The question is whether the court will punish one side for doing it more effectively.