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Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI
- mrcwinn 5mo agoAdvice for Elon: you can actually use ChatGPT on the web or the desktop app to schedule reminders for you, like "file lawsuit against OpenAI."
- LarsDu88 5mo agoDid you not read the article at all? He had to do this in 2021, well before such GPT apps existed.
- freejazz 5mo agoThat's not what the article stated. The jury had to find that the harms occurred prior to certain dates in 2021, not that Musk had to file before then.
- jordanb 5mo agoThe consequences of relying on grok..
- rvz 5mo agoSam is just too good at this game and as I said before [0] is far worse than Elon and also outsmarted him. Of course this will be appealed but, as you see the claims just don't stick. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651664
- armchairhacker 5mo agoWhy do you think Sam is worse than Elon?
- an0malous 5mo agoI’m not a Sam Altman fan, but I think it’s debatable if he’s worse than the guy who did a sieg heil at a political rally
- whaleofatw2022 5mo agoBe more afraid of the technocrat who doesn't even have a tell. It means they are better at manipulation.
- armchairhacker 5mo agoDoes this also mean we should be more afraid of (leadership) Democrats than Republicans?
- foofyter 5mo ago[flagged]
- russellbrandom 5mo agoHe lost in the sense that he filed a lawsuit and that lawsuit was dismissed. It seems like a reasonable way to use the word, no?
- donkyrf 5mo agoObviously so. You're either responding to an LLM or a badly malfunctioning human.
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- dirtbagskier 5mo ago[dead]
- 2b3a51 5mo agoReached for comment by TechCrunch, Musk’s lead counsel Marc Toberoff said, “One word: Appeal.” One wonders on what grounds? In the UK, in a civil case like this, the judge I think comments on the likelihood of an appeal avenue once the verdict has been reached.
- Legend2440 5mo agoOn the grounds of "I have infinite money and lawyers to drag this thing out forever, whether I'll win or not."
- 2b3a51 5mo agoNothing like 'vexatious litigation' in the US? https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vexatious-litigants https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vexatious-litigants
- Legend2440 5mo agoThere is, but it's a pretty high bar to clear. Merely exhausting one's appeals does not qualify as vexatious. He could keep going for years as long as his lawyers make vaguely plausible arguments each time.
- adastra22 5mo agoYou are allowed your appeals. That's part of your constitutional right to due process. There are some exceptions to this, but they are rare and usually only employed in extreme situations (aka things which would get the lawyers involved debarred).
- SuddsMcDuff 5mo agoMuddying the right of appeal with vexatious litigation is a very dark road to go down. I'm sure people in the US are in no mood to take any advice from us here in the UK, having just recently abolished the right to a jury trial.
- ryandrake 5mo ago
- iamkrazy 5mo ago[flagged]
- dbbk 5mo agoThey have open models
- shagie 5mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20160220093339/https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160220093339/https://openai.co... > OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. > Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible. --- https://web.archive.org/web/20180323231344/https://openai.com/about/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180323231344/https://openai.co... > We publish at top machine learning conferences, open-source software tools for accelerating AI research, and release blog posts to communicate our research. We will not keep information private for private benefit, but in the long term, we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns. --- It's about open research. https://openai.com/research/index/ https://openai.com/research/index/
- Analemma_ 5mo agoThis was pretty much the quality of Elon's argumentation in court. Turns out "getting sick dunks" wins likes on Twitter, but it doesn't win lawsuits.
- mustaphah 5mo agoThe strongest evidence against Musk was Musk. His own 2017 emails supporting for-profit chats made the "betrayal" narrative very hard to sell.
- dzonga 5mo agoMuskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him. e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.
- mustaphah 5mo agoExtreme smartness has its own failure modes
- tombert 5mo agoI'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
- peterfirefly 5mo agoIt's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that. It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures. It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures. Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself. Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course. Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.
- trilogic 5mo ago[flagged]
- paxys 5mo ago> A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations. Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.
- sdenton4 5mo agoA dismissal on technical grounds, which is also a complete loss.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoNo, it's a complete loss. Much like in engineering, the law considers technical details to be extraordinarily important.
- loxodrome 5mo agoEnding a trial over a bureaucratic technicality is not good justice.
- paxys 5mo agoStatute of limitations is not a "bureaucratic technicality", it is the law.
- jacobp100 5mo agoIt can be both
- wagwang 5mo agoCan some lawyer explain the rationale of statute of limitations? Like why does a robber get to get away with the crime if they are able to evade the police for x number of years. Is it just because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything?
- throwway120385 5mo agoThe easier scenario to think about where statutes of limitation really make sense is in collection of payment through the court system. Suppose you buy something on post-payment terms and then the supplier bumbles around forgetting to bill you for it. At what point should you reasonably be expected to pay the bill? In my state you get 7 years, and I think that's probably pretty generous because it covers the entire tab from when you get the thing to when you start a proceeding in court. For a robbery that doesn't involve a weapon I think we should generally forgive and forget if it's been long enough. Nobody cared enough to bring action in court for whatever reason, and it would be awful for someone in their 40's to be jailed and brought into court for something that happened in their 20's. At that point if the government fails to prosecute that's on them, and on us for failing to hold them accountable. But 20 years is a long time and people can change over that timespan, so it probably doesn't make sense to hold a grudge for that long. There are especially egregious crimes that have no statute of limitations like murder and sexual assault, but we might find our society better off for keeping the statute of limitations for injuries that we can recover from.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- tahoeskibum 5mo agoAnybody read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
- modeless 5mo agoYeah people are going to make up a lot of reasons why Elon lost that have nothing to do with the actual and very simple reason.
- dcow 5mo agoRight. Nobody cares whether Musk won or lost (well maybe a few do). People actually following the case wanted to know whether OpenAI would be held in any way accountable for anything. And this “resolution” does not satisfy. Before Musk got involved, what happened at OpenAI was a BigProblem for many people.
- pj_mukh 5mo agoWait but that’s the crux of his argument that he was “wronged”. Not “wronged but only once xAI started competing with OpenAI”. He can’t prove the former, if the latter is true. If anyone is/was truly still wronged by OpenAI changing corporate structure they are still able to sue and prove damages. Yet surprisingly no one has come forward on this.
- lqstuart 5mo agoMaybe one of the scientists who cashed out 8 figures will file a suit that OpenAI has wronged them by depriving them of the joy of working
- gamblor956 5mo agoNobody else has come forward because the number of people with a potential legal claim for asserting any such harm was a small group of between 2 and 6 people, of which Musk was one (setting aside SOL issues).
- SilentM68 5mo agoI did, but I think most people here are just reacting to everybody else's differing opinions cause most if not all have a love/hate relationship with Musk. Doubt anybody here is actually reading the story and understanding and failing to understand the new future legal implications, e.g. a critical shift in legal thinking which will force a greater focus on security practices of AI development companies aka "security audit" defense. As stated by an earlier poster, this could lead to a future plaintiff arguing that a company's failure to adequately secure its confidential information will be enough to constitute a fundamental breach of its contractual obligations, irrespective of how the info was subsequently leaked. Sol Roth
- mugivarra69 5mo ago[dead]
- tptacek 5mo agoI think a lot about how there's a very plausible alternate history where Elon Musk controls most of the frontier of AI.
- sanderjd 5mo agoThere but for the grace of god go we...
- dragontamer 5mo agoYou speak as if Elon Musk didn't buy tons of AI chips for full self driving (Dojo) and COMPLETELY flub it. It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.
- fastball 5mo agoTesla wasn't "successful" before he "took it over" (read: invested most of their seed capital and ran the actual day-to-day operations). SpaceX, founded entirely by him alone, is also the most valuable space technology company on earth, so...
- dragontamer 5mo agoWell sure. But that's not AI chips or FSD. The subject of this whole topic. Within this realm of AI, Musk has constantly invested and failed. Dojo, xAI, Grok. His newest idea is leveraging SpaceX money to put data centers in Space. Good luck with that.
- fastball 5mo agoYour previous comment was clearly not constraining itself to the realm of AI chips / FSD. Regardless: How do you measure Dojo, xAI, and Grok being failures? Dojo is training models for FSD, which is in operation today. The chips in Tesla cars are also taped in-house / vertically integrated, a lot of which is presumably shared investment with the chips needed for the Dojo training side specifically. Separating xAI from Grok (in a list like this) is kinda weird, but seems that Grok is actually a very capable LLM, even if it is not best-in-practice. Even if not beating out the top 3 labs, it certainly seems to be in the top 5 by most metrics. The xAI Colossus data centers are real AI training/inference infrastructure that were stood up in record time, and they are now selling capacity to other LLM providers. Is that a failure?
- tskj 5mo agoAnnoying that it had to be Musk to take this fight, but isn't it very unfortunate that OpenAI is allowed to do this non-profit whoopsie we're now a for-profit thing?
- cityofdelusion 5mo agoThis should clear the path to the IPO and lead to a VERY profitable payday for those holding OpenAI equity. Millionaires and billionaires will be minted ~one year from now.
- granzymes 5mo agoBecause no one has commented yet on the legal significance: Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations. Because the statute of limitations is a precondition, the jury was not asked to find any other facts. They may tell the press what they thought on other issues, or they may not. The judge was prepared to immediately accept the jury’s finding, and said she agreed that the jury’s decision was supported by the evidence. It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely. Whether Musk’s claims are barred by the statute of limitations is a quintessential question of fact, and appellate courts are extraordinarily deferential to factual findings by juries so as a practical matter it’s almost impossible to appeal this verdict.
- Arodex 5mo ago>Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations. Why is a hypothetical ground for this decision? "You didn't complain immediately the first time you got robbed, therefore all the robbing since then is covered by a statute of limitation".
- chipsrafferty 5mo agoThere are multiple reasons why statutes of limitations exist, one of them being that the further away in time, the harder it is to prove evidence. Witnesses may have died, or their memory may be more faulty.
- hnfong 5mo agoAlso criminal liability is generally handled differently. Some jurisdictions have no limit, and where the limits exist for criminal liability, limitations on serious crimes can be much longer than the civil ones.
- jdw64 5mo agoIt turns out 'stealing a charity' is strictly defined in California law as 'commercializing it with Microsoft instead of my car company.' Glad we finally got that clarified
- cubefox 5mo agoSo you are allowed to violate the law if you aren't sued quickly enough.
- pocksuppet 5mo agoYes. This has always been, and will always be, the case. It's the same in things like copyright law - you can violate any software license if the copyright holder doesn't know you're doing it, or doesn't want to sue you, or doesn't sue you in time. It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.
- cubefox 5mo agoWhat Altman and Brockman did still seems highly unethical.
- johnbellone 5mo agoThat shouldn’t surprise anyone.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoThe tech industry largely does not care about ethics.
- DANmode 5mo agoYou misspelled “finance”.
- DANmode 5mo ago> It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB. They didn’t do any lobbying? ^_^
- pocksuppet 5mo agoThey pretty much just broke the law, scaled fast and then their lobbying was "the whole population would hate you if you shut us down now"
- thesdev 5mo agoI hope he appeals. Not cheering for Musk, cheering for the fight.
- enraged_camel 5mo agoThere's nothing to appeal. Statute of limitations is... just that.
- paulpauper 5mo agoFor criminal cases at least, the statue of limitations is not set in stone. But probably for civil, its much more cut and dry.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoCriminal law actually has very specific statutes of limitation as well, depending on the crime.
- lowkey_ 5mo agoIANAL but civil statute of limitations is based on when the prosecuting party reasonably discovered they were wronged and had legal recourse, not when the event happened. It is entirely possible to debate when that was in this case.
- lapetitejort 5mo agoCross examination is one of the vanishingly few times you can see billionaires and executives act like human beings instead of sentient PR scripts.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoIt would just burn more cash unless he can somehow go back in time and change the facts.
- hoppyhoppy2 5mo agoYes, and more burnt cash (and hopefully emotional energy) would be an acceptable outcome
- alok-g 5mo agoThe lawsuit side, genuinely asking, how does the for-profit under non-profit setup work? What are the respective roles? Is the combination effectively a non-profit still? Or is this some kind of legal loophole to make profits under a non-profit?
- mrhottakes 5mo agoLots of non-profits use structures like that, it's not uncommon. Non-profit vs. for-profit is mostly a legal and accounting distinction; many laypeople confuse "non-profit" with "charity" and they are very different.
- protocolture 5mo agoI used to work for one. Probably not that similar, as one was a PBI. But one entity paid and billed back to the other. It was interesting to see how the way the 2 entities spent money differently.
- gkanai 5mo agoThe Mozilla Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation. The Corporation hires the engineering staff that does the bulk of the work to develop Firefox (the rest are community/volunteer contributors and partners.)
- jgalt212 5mo agoWho cares if the plaintiff or defendant won? The trial had great expository value regarding all the players involved.
- atom_arranger 5mo agoAside from the disagreements between these parties, what about the precedent of running a non-profit, and then transferring all IP to a for profit when it’s convenient to do so? I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.
- granzymes 5mo agoThis case sets no precedent one way or the other on that question. The IP was transferred to the for-profit for fair value in 2019, and Musk never argued otherwise in this case. The attorneys general of California and Delaware could challenge that 2019 IP transfer if they so wished on behalf of the public.
- chaseadam17 5mo agoWhich they are unlikely to do because the California AG signed off on the original IP transfer agreement…
- Morromist 5mo agoYeah. I wonder if the question "Did OpenAI steal a non-profit worth what is now maybe hundreds of billions of dollars?" will ever be answered. If not it will be one of the biggest heists in history.
- CPLX 5mo agoOf course that question has been answered. They stole it. Only people who are pretending to be confused are people for whom it's in their interest to be confused. They created a non-profit with the intention of launching AI to make sure that it would stay in the public trust, and then once it became really valuable, they spirited it away into private hands. It's just a fact. It's obvious from looking at the thing. The details are designed to confuse and trick you into thinking that what you can plainly see happening is OK somehow.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoTransactions like that happen all the time and are not problematic if handled legally. Any of the interested parties could have sued over it, but none have.
- Deprogrammer9 5mo ago[flagged]
- shevy-java 5mo agoBoth should be fined for wasting our time with fake-troll court cases. Basically the title of the court case was: "Is Skynet slop going to be helpful to mankind". We all know how that story ends. Thus, fining both is warranted. When the superrich go to court, they should pay an extra fee. Like a billion per court case or so.
- keeda 5mo agoWhile none of the billionnaires on the stand came across as stellar paragons of virtue, it's hilarious that even they could not stand Elon. That said, even though Altman is a shifty dude who's clearly playing a Game of Thrones while all others are playing Capitalism, I am extremely grateful that it's him running OpenAI and not Elon. Seeing what Elon has done to Twitter, I shudder to think of what he'd do with ChatGPT. The level of reach and subtle influence he would have is insane. He could do with private chats what he's doing to public discourse, and it would all be invisible. On the other hand, seeing what he's done with Grok, it's very likely OpenAI would be where xAI is and would never reach this level of adoption and influence. Which seems to be what most people at OpenAI were really worried about.
- htx80nerd 5mo ago[flagged]
- protocolture 5mo ago"Free Speech" Do they still censor the word "Cis".
- jsLavaGoat 5mo agoHe lost his trial. That is just the first phase of a lawsuit.
- mrhottakes 5mo agoNo, it's effectively over.
- jsLavaGoat 5mo ago>effectively right, that's my point. not entirely or literally. Unless you drop it, there is never a case that is over at the trial phase. Anyone reporting on legal matters should know this language matters. Also: it's not even "effectively" over: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/musk-altman-openai-trial-verdict.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/musk-altman-openai-trial-ver...
- jsLavaGoat 5mo agoDon't know why this was downvoted, Musk is appealing. I'm not expecting people to be civil procedure experts, but it's pretty much high school Government that there are appeals after trials. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/musk-altman-openai-trial-verdict.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/musk-altman-openai-trial-ver...
- moralestapia 5mo agoYou can hate Musk all you want but between him and Scam I'd pick Musk any day. What they did to him was unfair, he put in all the money, office and initial push, he deserves a piece of the pie he created. This is quite unfair towards him.
- eukara 5mo agoShould have done it sooner. He took his time. He should know timing is important: That's why he frequently skips getting approval for his construction work, dumps drilling fluids (while feigning compliance!)... or builds an illegal power plant. He usually seems to have little patience. We're all supposed to play by the same rules.
- protocolture 5mo agoHe isn't asking for money tho? He is suing because he believes he was promised that it would be a not for profit forever. But they have emails from one Elon Musk telling them to structure it roughly how it turned out. They also have emails including Musk where the profit share is discussed, and his "investment" is talked about as roughly a donation. Like he could have asked for a profit share at any point and it just doesn't seem to happen? If the outcome is unfair to Musk, its because Musk worked tirelessly to ensure he had no legal standing with which to make it fair to Musk.
- DivingForGold 5mo agoMusk may have lost round 1, but Musk has a HUGE pile of cash, and Open AI is a borrower from everybody and their brothers. Almost all the principle people left Open AI already.
- ajross 5mo agoThat's misunderstanding the finances involved here. OpenAI is a privately held company; sure, that means they're "borrowing" from their investors technically. But that's in exactly the same sense that a public company is actually "owned" by its shareholders. The behavioral relationship goes the other way: people own bits of the company because they want it to do well and their share to grow in size, not because they expect the debt/dividend to be repaid per se. In point of fact most valuations place OpenAI in the hundreds of billions of dollars already and growing rapidly. Basically, no: OpenAI's pockets are deeper than Musks's personal wealth. Especially so considering that this suit is existentially important to them where Musk needs to maintain leverage for other efforts. There won't be a round 2. It's over.
- henry2023 5mo agoMusk doesn’t seem particularly good at lawsuits. Remember when he was suing Twitter to get out of having to buy them? Perhaps he lacks good lawyers, perhaps he just can’t find substance and he’s filling out of spite.
- hcurtiss 5mo agoRemember Delaware? Where he not only won on appeal but provoked an exodus of companies out of Delaware?
- yalogin 5mo agoThis should have been thrown away from the start, not sure why it saw a day in court. Musk himsrlf created xAi that is for profit. If he really is concerned about ai his own actions do not show that. This is just regret that he lost control of OpenAI, a trillion dollar company, and nothing more.
- ViAchKoN 5mo agoInteresting how it played out. Curious will it somehow affect OpenAI business or XAi.
- achatham 5mo agoThe donation was also made through a donor advised fund (DAF), which means Musk didn't legally make the donation. I'm surprised he didn't lose on not having standing.
- polalavik 5mo agoit was probably never about winning for Musk, but to leverage the legal system to air out some drama in open AI and some internal dialogue among the execs of the company for bad press.
- aanet 5mo agoThis was one trial where I didn’t want either side to win
- asadm 5mo agoI feel like there still needs to be a penalty to OpenAI here even if that doesn't favor Musk (even though he funded the whole thing). It is still a theft.
- greenpizza13 5mo agoNeed standing to claim theft, need to be within statue of limitations. It's not theft unless a jury says it is, they didn't say it is.
- HardCodedBias 5mo agoI think that your first statement is correct. I do not think that your second was correct.
- karmickoala 5mo agoO.J. Simpson comes to mind.
- testfrequency 5mo agoEvery AI model swallowing the entire world of digital and physical data to then be resold back to the people will forever be the biggest heist ever pulled off in our lifetime. I’m shocked how little it gets talked about, and how convenient it is that many of these companies lost or burned their paper trails
- protocolture 5mo ago1. No if anything, the idea that works cant be built using other products without the express permission of the original author would be the greater heist. 2. This has nothing to do with the case which was just Musk trying to punish his competitor.
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoThe jury didn't say it isn't either. All they ruled on was that it was too late for Musk to even broach the question.
- jazz9k 5mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- gilrain 5mo agoIt isn’t fun when billionaires fight — an asshole always ends up winning.
- graphememes 5mo agoLosing on a technicality kind of sucks ngl
- jamiek88 5mo agoIt’s a finding of fact and a fundamental law not a ‘technicality’ but I can see that’s going to be the pro-elon position already.
- polski-g 5mo agoI don't understand why this is a Musk lawsuit and not an IRS lawsuit. How can you take donations under a charity org and then convert it to a for profit corp?
- woopsn 5mo agoInteresting quotes from the discovery emails. - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr/openai-email-archives-from-musk-v-altman-and-openai-blog https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr/openai-ema... "At some point we’d get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn’t be on the governance board" "generally, safety should be a first-class requirement" "Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit" "Because we don't have any financial obligations, we can focus on the maximal positive human impact" "The underlying philosophy of our company [OpenAI] is to disseminate AI technology as broadly as possible as an extension of all individual human wills, ensuring, in the spirit of liberty, that the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated and evolves toward the future desired by the sum of humanity" "The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the pay is low compared to what others will offer, but we believe the goal and the structure are right" "do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone's comp by 100-200k per year?" "The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it." "it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes)" "Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn't sound super hard." "Powerful ideas are produced by top people. Massive clusters help, and are very worth getting, but they play a less important role." "Deepmind is causing me extreme mental stress." "At any given time, we will take the action that is likely to most strongly benefit the world." "Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft's marketing bitch." "Ok. Let's figure out the least expensive way to ensure compute power is not a constraint..." "Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved . . . In as little as four years, each overnight experiment will feasibly use so much compute capacity that there’s an actual chance of waking up to AGI" "We think the path must be: AI research non-profit (through end of 2017), AI research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018), Government project (when: ??)" "Satisfying this means a situation where, regardless of what happens to the three of them, it's guaranteed that power over the company is distributed after the 2-3 year initial period" "As mentioned, my experience with boards (assuming they consist of good, smart people) is that they are rational and reasonable. There is basically never a real hardcore battle. . ." "The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you. As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge. . ." "Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission" "During this negotiation, we realized that we have allowed the idea of financial return 2-3 years down the line to drive our decisions . . . this attitude is wrong" "i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!" ". . .apparently in the last day almost everyone has been told that the for-profit structure is not happening and he [Sam] is happy about this" "Our goal and mission are fundamentally correct" "We also have identified a small but finite number of limitations in today's deep learning which are barriers to learning from human levels of experience. And we believe we uniquely are on trajectory to solving safety (at least in broad strokes) in the next three years." "Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity. Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem, rather than the fig leaf you've noted in other institutions. It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies. Related to this, we need to communicate a "better red than dead" outlook — we're trying to build safe AGI, and we're not willing to destroy the world in a down-to-the-wire race to do so." "The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before." "This needs billions per year immediately or forget it." "all investors are clear that they should never expect a profit" "We saw no alternative to a structure change given the amount of capital we needed and still to preserve a way to 'give the AGI to humanity' other than the capped profit thing, which also lets the board cancel all equity if needed for safety. Fwiw I personally have no equity and never have."
- martinbfine 5mo agoIt really doesn't matter. OpenAI will surely fail under Sam Altman. Just like Sam's other ventures.
- ownerai 5mo agoNine jurors, unanimous, under two hours. The statute of limitations argument wasn't even close.
- jamiek88 5mo agoAnyone getting emotional in this thread arguing on behalf of either billionaire should have a long hard look in the mirror.
- gigatexal 5mo agoMaybe if musk continues to be shown he’s a wholly immoral person and a net negative for society he’ll get so fed up he’ll take his ball and hop on his space ship and yeet himself onto the surface of mars. One can hope.
- jongjong 5mo agoI don't think justice applies to any entity with a market cap above $500 billion. What do you think would happen to the jury and the judge if they did the right thing and acknowledged that OpenAI is a non-profit? Probably got threatened already. It wouldn't be safe for them. At least they're awake now. I bet this is just like crypto sector. The correct remedy would be to return OpenAI to its former non-profit structure but that's never going to happen in the current system. The next thing after 'too big to fail' is 'too big to litigate.' Stealing a non-profit entity is legal if enough people dump billions of dollars in it.
- deferredgrant 5mo ago[flagged]
- mrcwinn 5mo agoI'm sure this all has to do with lawyers making as much money as possible — but if that's a potential standing or statute question, why not have a jury settle that question first, before the trial starts? Or to have a narrower process focused only on discovery and facts related to the statute?
- mococa 5mo agoNot sure if I celebrate or not…
- overgard 5mo agoMy suspicion is that winning might have been a secondary goal. When OpenAI goes to IPO, all the testimony of former executives about Altman's behavior is going to be in the public record. A lot of that testimony makes OpenAI sound very chaotic and poorly run. That could prevent large institutional investors from wanting to take the risk.
- ActorNightly 5mo agoIm just curious what gives you an idea Musk and his cronies are actually intelligent enough to do this.
- elicash 5mo agoMusk texted OpenAI's Brockman about a settlement two days before trial. So I take that to mean Musk wanted a settlement as primary goal, and that the threat to OpenAI's reputation was just an (unsuccessful) means to get what he wanted. That isn't to say it wasn't personal for Musk, just that he would have preferred to have gotten paid. As to Musk texting "By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be" when the settlement offer was turned down, while I'd agree there were a ton of super embarrassing details that came out I don't think Musk was successful in making them more hated than even he is. I don't even think this secondary goal was successful, even though there were a ton of juicy bits.
- madrox 5mo agoIt seems like the real sour grapes are over the fact they wouldn't let him run OpenAI. If he cared about a payday, ironically, he probably would have had more success because he would have brought this suit sooner.
- overgard 5mo agoIt's hard to know without knowing the terms of the settlement. It could have easily been something he knew OpenAI would find to be unacceptable. I think regardless it would be extremely hard for him to make people hate Altman et al. more than himself. Altman's flaws are more subtle and require paying attention to a pattern of behavior. Musk has beem pure cringe for 5+ years now.
- whatever1 5mo agoSigheiling really helped his image. He should definitely try attending more jury trials. It will go great! PS Bravo to his lawyers. Get his cash folks by promising him that he will win!
- momo26 5mo agoAsking for a hundred billion in damages and having your multi-million dollar legal team defeated not on the merits of the case, but because they literally forgot to look at the calendar lol
- madrox 5mo agoI wonder if Elon ever expected to win, or even cared about winning. It's been obvious for a while that OpenAI becoming for-profit historically wasn't really an issue for him, despite what he says in public these days. I imagine that for him the goal was always to damage OpenAI's reputation in order to distract them from progress or raising capital, giving xAI more time to catch up. I don't think it's a coincidence he didn't bring this suit until after the Altman ouster debacle. Discovery was probably the real objective all along.
- adampunk 5mo agoyeah, he had a secret plan to file his lawsuit late. Real n-dimensional chess here.
- codemog 5mo agoThe amount of cope people have around Elon’s irrational drug addict behavior is insane. Was lying about being good at video games and getting caught also 8D chess too?
- madrox 5mo agoI don't say this in a "what a brilliant tactician he is" sense. I think AI in general caught him off guard and he was upset they didn't let him run OpenAI. I'm sure his lawyers told him he wasn't likely to win, so have to assume embarrassment of OpenAI was the goal.
- adampunk 5mo ago>so have to assume embarrassment of OpenAI was the goal. Why do you have to assume that?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- sidcool 5mo agoI think the same. As much as I like Elon's companies, this case seemed like a strategy, and part envy. He wants to be the first in everything
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago"Musk announced on X that he will be appealing the decision. "The judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality," he wrote." Musk is an idiot Lawyers will be happy to take more of his money https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/18/1137488/elon-musk-suit-openai-verdict/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/18/1137488/elon-mus...
- dbg31415 5mo agoI’m sad to learn this news. I was really hoping they could somehow both lose.
- ggm 5mo agoCosts?
- epolanski 5mo agoAs Buffett said, the difference between normal and rich people is that the second group spend their lives suing each others, and the closer they are or were the more lawsuits you get.
- throwccp 5mo ago[dead]
- Caracas288 5mo agoIt’s dissapointing that the only significant obstacle standing in the way of this ‘privatisation’ was Elon Musk’s personal vendetta, when it affects the entire world’s future. Big money.
- shantnutiwari 5mo agoHe lost on a technicality -- filing too late. Does that mean he can file more nuisance lawsuits?
- tim333 5mo agoHe says he's going to be try. Legally though it'd be hard to go anywhere with this one.
- teddyX 5mo agoFelon needs mental support
- zhouquanxi 5mo ago[flagged]