Author|Hualin Dance King
Editor| Jingyu
In the classic gangster film 'The Godfather,' there's a line that has been passed down to this day—'This is not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business.'
But reality is often more complicated. When business and personal grudges are entangled, when a person is both a former co-founder and today's strongest competitor, it's hard to say whether the lawsuit is a legal document or a long-delayed letter of severance.
In Silicon Valley and across the US, the most high-profile legal battle currently is undoubtedly the ongoing courtroom showdown between Musk and Altman.
Now, this years-long 'grudge' finally has its first-phase result.
On May 18, 2026, local time, in a San Francisco federal court, nine jurors delivered their answer in less than two hours—Musk lost.
01 A 6-Year Grudge Gets a Verdict
The jury's decision was not complex, even somewhat 'technical.'
The court did not directly address Musk's most central allegation—whether OpenAI betrayed its original charitable mission when it spun off its for-profit operations from the non-profit parent entity and introduced commercial investments from Microsoft and others. The jury bypassed this 'soul-searching question' and dismissed all claims directly on the grounds of the statute of limitations.
California law stipulates that such claims must be filed within three years of the relevant event occurring. OpenAI opening up investment to Microsoft and gradually advancing its commercialization transformation—these key milestones were publicly known as early as around 2019. Musk did not formally file the lawsuit until 2024. The jury found that this was beyond the statutory deadline.
9 votes to 0. Unanimous.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stated after the trial that there was substantial evidence to support the jury's verdict and explicitly declared that she is prepared to 'dismiss on the spot' any potential motions for appeal that Musk might file. The phrasing, unusually blunt.
OpenAI's lead attorney, William Savitt, went straight for the core of Musk's narrative in his post-trial statement—'This was not a technical decision, but a substantive decision. You waited too long to bring these claims, and you did so because you (Musk) were preserving these claims as a weapon to use when you could not compete with your rival in the marketplace.'
This statement is heavy. Its implication is that Musk is not a plaintiff but a commercial opponent wielding judicial process as a knife.
02 Lawsuit or Feud?
To understand the real logic of this lawsuit, one must go back to 2015.
That year, Musk, Altman, Greg Brockman, and others co-founded OpenAI, explicitly positioning it as a non-profit with the mission 'to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.' Musk provided significant funding in the early days and was deeply involved in discussions about the company's direction.
In 2018, he left the board, citing 'a potential future conflict of interest' with Tesla.
The subsequent story is mostly known. OpenAI introduced Microsoft's investment in 2019, gradually establishing a 'capped-profit' hybrid structure. ChatGPT exploded onto the scene, and its valuation skyrocketed. Musk, meanwhile, founded his own AI company, xAI, in 2023, launching the Grok model to directly compete with OpenAI.
In 2024, the lawsuit was formally filed. Musk accused Altman and Brockman of violating the original charitable promise, achieving massive personal wealth by commercializing the company—the term he used was 'hijacking a charity.'
This narrative had some moral appeal, but the timeline betrayed him.
The key decisions for OpenAI's commercialization transformation occurred between 2019 and 2021, transparently and with extensive coverage in tech media. Musk was not unaware; he chose to play this card only after his competitor had grown large and during the most critical window just before a potential IPO.
Musk's attorney, Marc Toberoff, still maintained the moral stance after the trial—'This was a statement about OpenAI's misuse of a charity. If not for Musk, they would have gotten away with it.' But they also announced plans to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This fight is clearly not truly over.
03 OpenAI Clears the Biggest Hurdle?
From OpenAI's perspective, the significance of this verdict extends far beyond the legal aspect.
Wall Street analysts offer the most direct interpretation. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives pointed out that the lawsuit's greatest potential threat was that it could have forced OpenAI into a massive structural reorganization—if the court had found that the commercialization violated charitable trust obligations, the entire company structure could have faced disruptive changes.
'Now, the worst-case scenario is largely off the table. This is a significant positive for OpenAI's IPO.'
A legal sword of Damocles that had been hanging overhead for six years fell in just two hours.
Meanwhile, OpenAI's own commercial momentum is at its strongest point in history. Over the past two weeks, the company has intensively released a series of signals: the newly launched GPT-5.5 Instant became the default model for ChatGPT, reducing hallucination rates in high-risk scenarios by over 50%; three real-time audio models for enterprise scenarios were released simultaneously, with GPT-Realtime-Translate supporting real-time translation for over 70 languages; the Codex programming assistant has also landed on mobile, allowing developers to review code and approve commands anywhere.
Simultaneously, in a new round of financing completed roughly two weeks ago, OpenAI raised $12.2 billion at an $852 billion valuation, led jointly by Amazon, NVIDIA, SoftBank, and Microsoft. According to the latest data, the company's monthly revenue has reached approximately $2 billion, with over 900 million weekly active users.
At this juncture, any legal risk that could trigger a company reorganization would be the most dangerous variable in the IPO process. The verdict has cleared that rock.
Microsoft's statement is also quite telling—'The facts and timeline of this case have always been clear. We welcome the jury's decision to dismiss these claims, and we remain committed to partnering with OpenAI.' As OpenAI's largest external partner, Microsoft's wording was calm and resolute.
04 The Unanswered Question
It must be clarified that the verdict's outcome should not be over-interpreted as a moral 'acquittal.'
The jury dismissed on the grounds of the statute of limitations, not on the basis that 'OpenAI did not betray its mission.'
The court never answered that core question—when a non-profit institution founded under the banner of 'benefiting all of humanity' transforms into a commercial behemoth worth hundreds of billions, where has its founding spirit gone?
This question will not disappear with the end of a lawsuit.
In fact, just as OpenAI's IPO window approaches, the company is quietly adjusting its structure, re-clarifying the relationship between the non-profit part and the for-profit entity. This is not a concession to Musk, but a structural question the entire AI industry must face in its commercialization process.
The tension between technological idealism and commercial realism is the eternal underlying contradiction of Silicon Valley.
From Google's early 'Don't be evil' to Facebook's 'Connect the world' to OpenAI's 'for all of humanity,' these lofty founding narratives have ultimately undergone varying degrees of distortion under the gravity of capital. Musk's anger, whatever its motive, touches on a real anxiety—when AI, a technology that could reshape civilization, is placed inside a commercial company preparing for an IPO, what should we believe in?
The court cannot provide the answer to that.
Musk announces his appeal. Altman wins today. But the deeper debate about who AI should belong to and who should control it is just entering a new phase.
