OpenAI–Musk legal fight heats
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI is headed for a jury trial in Oakland this month after a judge refused to dismiss the case, and OpenAI warns the suit could cripple its nonprofit mission. (finance.yahoo.com) Musk has amended the complaint — offering to donate any damages to OpenAI’s nonprofit arm and reportedly seeking Sam Altman’s removal from the nonprofit board — while OpenAI calls the suit a “baseless power play.” (arstechnica.com) At the same time OpenAI is signalling market strength: it says it closed a $122 billion funding round, plans to allocate IPO shares to retail investors, and that enterprise revenue already makes up about 40% of the business. (finance.yahoo.com) (cnbc.com)
A courtroom in Oakland is about to decide whether OpenAI broke the deal it made when Elon Musk helped start it, and the judge has already refused to throw the case out before trial. The jury trial is scheduled for late April 2026 in federal court after Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers let Musk’s core claims move forward. (techspot.com) Musk’s case is built around a simple accusation: OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, then built a for-profit structure that he says abandoned that original promise. OpenAI says the lawsuit twists old emails and corporate history into what it calls a “baseless power play.” (gizmodo.com) (msn.com) The fight is not just about money damages anymore. In an amended complaint filed this week, Musk said any damages should go to OpenAI’s nonprofit arm and also asked for Sam Altman to be removed from that nonprofit’s board. (msn.com) That change matters because it lets Musk argue he is trying to restore the original mission, not just collect a payout for himself. It also puts OpenAI’s unusual structure at the center of the case, where a nonprofit board sits above a profit-seeking business that now sells artificial intelligence tools around the world. (arstechnica.com) OpenAI is answering with a different accusation: that Musk is using courts and regulators to slow down a rival he now competes with through xAI, the artificial intelligence company he launched in 2023. This week OpenAI asked the attorneys general of California and Delaware to investigate what it called Musk’s “improper and anti-competitive behavior.” (gizmodo.com) (msn.com) That rivalry got more direct in February 2025, when Musk’s xAI group made an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI. OpenAI rejected that offer, and the legal fight has kept escalating since then instead of cooling down. (gizmodo.com) While the lawsuit moves toward a jury, OpenAI is trying to show it is not a wounded company. On March 31, 2026, it said it closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion post-money valuation, which CNBC described as record-breaking. (cnbc.com) (finance.yahoo.com) OpenAI is also talking like a company already preparing for the stock market. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC on April 8 that OpenAI plans to reserve part of a future initial public offering for retail investors, meaning ordinary individuals rather than just giant funds and banks. (cnbc.com) Friar added that enterprise revenue now makes up about 40% of OpenAI’s business, which means a large share of its sales comes from companies buying tools for work rather than consumers paying for chatbots at home. That detail matters in court and on Wall Street because business customers usually look more durable than hype. (cnbc.com) So the same month OpenAI is pitching scale, revenue mix, and an eventual initial public offering, it is also defending its founding story in front of a jury. Musk is asking the court to treat OpenAI’s transformation as a broken promise, and OpenAI is asking the public to see the case as an attack from a competitor watching it get bigger. (techspot.com) (cnbc.com)
