Why Elon Musk’s $150B OpenAI Lawsuit Was Dismissed

• A federal jury in Oakland unanimously dismissed Elon Musk’s $150 Billion suit against OpenAI. The jury ruled that Musk waited too long to sue, finding his claims fell outside the three-year statute of limitations. The court never ruled on whether OpenAI actually broke its founding promise. That question remains legally unanswered.
• The verdict clears a significant obstacle for OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit entity and its path toward a public market debut — currently targeting the end of 2026 at an $852 billion valuation. OpenAI still has multiple legal battles ahead.
• Musk has vowed to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. If the court takes the case, the substantive question could finally get a hearing on the merits. The legal fight has another chapter.
• Musk and Altman are two of the most influential figures in the AI-crypto space. Musk’s history with DOGE shows that his actions, wins, and losses affect its market price. Altman runs a live crypto project in World (formerly Worldcoin) with a trading token. What happens to their resources and momentum in this fight has indirect but real effects on the crypto space.

The Ruling

On May 18, a federal jury in California unanimously dismissed Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI. The advisory jury, which decided in two hours, found that Elon Musk’s suit against Sam Altman’s OpenAI, which he filed in February 2024, was filed outside the three-year statute of limitations. The presiding district court judge, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, adopted the jury’s verdict.

Elon Musk and his legal team intend to file an appeal.

How We Got Here: Musk vs OpenAI

In 2015, Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI alongside Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and others. It was created as a nonprofit organisation. By 2018, due to alleged power disputes, Elon Musk had left the company.

In 2019, OpenAI announced that it would be moving from nonprofit to ‘capped-profit‘ as a way to raise capital to attract and retain researchers. By late 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and, within a few months, had an active monthly user base of over 100 million.

During the trial, OpenAI argued that by Summer 2017, Elon Musk and the other co-founders agreed that the company needed to change direction if it wanted to make any progress with its mission. It also claims that by the fall of 2017, Elon demanded total control and the CEO role at the proposed ‘for-profit’ OpenAI, the origin of the power struggle. By February 2018, Elon resigned as co-chair of OpenAI.

OpenAI’s move from nonprofit to a capped-profit structure in 2019, and its subsequent partnership with Microsoft that same year, were public knowledge. As early as 2020, Elon Musk began publicly disagreeing with OpenAI’s direction.

OpenAI’s lawyers argued, and the jury agreed, that Elon knew or should have reasonably known about the alleged breach years before he filed in 2024.

Musk, who had donated around $38 million to OpenAI in its early days, claimed that Sam Altman and the co-defendants betrayed OpenAI’s nonprofit founding mission, which was seeking the damages, which his legal team argued were worth $150 billion, should be paid to the nonprofit arm of OpenAI, and the removal of Sam Altman from the company’s board.

Whatever promise was or wasn’t made, or broken, the jury’s dismissal and the grounds for the dismissal were that, legally, it was too late to argue it; the three-year statute-of-limitations clock had run out.

What This Means For OpenAI’s Restructuring

This verdict clears some legal ground for OpenAI to move forward with its restructuring, but its path is not yet clear. This is just one of the many chapters in the legal battle between OpenAI and Elon Musk. OpenAI has an open countersuit against Elon Musk, which it filed in April 2025, where it accuses Elon of using lawsuits in bad faith to stifle competition.

OpenAI, which is approaching a pre-funding valuation of $730 billion and a post-money valuation of $852 billion, aims to launch its IPO before the end of the year. A verdict in their favour, one that does not require them to remit $150 billion to their more charitable arm, helps their timeline.

OpenAI initially proposed a restructuring that would remove its nonprofit entity from overseeing the activities of its for-profit arm. Investigations and inquiries from the California and Delaware AG offices prompted OpenAI to instead create a separate public benefit corporation, PBC, within its nonprofit corporation, NFP.

This restructuring will help it compete with other tech giants like Google and Apple by removing its strict fundraising caps and paving the way for its planned IPO launch.

The Crypto Angle: Why This Matters Beyond Headlines

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are both prominent figures in the AI space, with Elon’s xAI serving as a direct competition for OpenAI. But the influence of these men spans beyond the AI space.

Elon Musk, for one, has been the single most market-moving voice for Dogecoin, a token h,e via the X platfor,m has repeatedly flirted with integrating for payments over the years via the X platform. A statement, a tweet, a win, or a loss in court could potentially affect the price of DOGE.

In March 2026, when Elon confirmed that X Money, a built-in digital wallet for the X platform, would enter the public access phase in April, the price of DOGE rallied by over 8% on speculation about the integration alone, indicating the reflexive attention the crypto market pays to his moves.

OpenAI is not the only creation in Sam Altman’s portfolio. He also co-founded Tools for Humanity, the company behind World, which was formerly known as WorldCoin. TFH is currently developing tech at the intersection of human digital identity and financial access.

In 2025, influenced by his work in AI, Sam Altman and TFH developed the Orb. The Orb, according to Altman, will be a way for “identifying and authenticating humans in the age of AGI.” At its launch, users received Worldcoin in their digital wallet.

Afterwards, the device scans your iris and sends you a 12,800-digit code unique to you, known as your iris code. The Orb is considered a potential method for verifying identity on the blockchain.

Neither man is a passive observer in the crypto space. Investors in crypto and web3 are often people interested in AI. The outcome of a legal battle between the two men, one seeking to control the most valuable AI company, has potential downstream effects on resources, project momentum, and, arguably most importantly, narrative, all of which shape crypto market prices.

Originally published at https://cryptoafrica.news on May 19, 2026.

Why Elon Musk’s $150B OpenAI Lawsuit Was Dismissed was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.