The clash traces back to Musk’s 2024 lawsuit, in which he alleged that OpenAI, Sam Altman and others abandoned the organisation’s original mission of developing advanced AI for the benefit of humanity rather than private gain. Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015 and left in 2018, argues that the company’s evolution into a profit-seeking structure, alongside its deep commercial ties with Microsoft, amounted to a betrayal of that mission. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied wrongdoing, and OpenAI has repeatedly described the case as baseless and commercially motivated.
What has raised the temperature this month is Musk’s attempt to reshape the case just before trial. Court reporting indicates that he is no longer seeking damages for himself personally, but instead wants any award directed to OpenAI’s nonprofit arm. He is also seeking the removal of Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman from leadership positions, while pressing for orders that would unwind OpenAI’s for-profit conversion and restore it to a nonprofit research model. OpenAI has answered that these new demands amount to an eleventh-hour effort to inject confusion into proceedings that have already been narrowed and scheduled.
The monetary stakes are unusually high even by Silicon Valley standards. In January, Reuters reported that Musk was seeking as much as $134 billion from OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that the two groups benefited enormously from his early money, recruitment work and public credibility. That figure was based on an expert analysis of what his team called “wrongful gains”, with claims ranging from roughly $65.5 billion to $109.4 billion against OpenAI and from $13.3 billion to $25.1 billion against Microsoft. More recent reports on the amended complaint suggest the headline figure has been pushed even higher in legal papers, though OpenAI has attacked those calculations as unverifiable.
Behind the courtroom rhetoric lies a broader struggle over how frontier AI should be financed and governed. OpenAI says Musk once agreed that a purely nonprofit structure would not be enough to fund the development of advanced systems, and it has published internal notes and correspondence to support that account. In January, the company argued publicly that Musk had supported a hybrid structure combining nonprofit oversight with a profit-making vehicle, and that negotiations broke down when OpenAI’s leadership refused to hand him full control or fold the organisation into Tesla. Musk’s camp has maintained that whatever earlier discussions took place, the end result violated the charitable purpose he believed he was backing.
That governance argument now lands at a moment when OpenAI is far larger, richer and more politically exposed than when the case began. Reuters has reported that the company’s restructuring has already transformed it into a public benefit corporation controlled by a nonprofit with a financial stake in its success. It has also reported huge capital inflows, a rapidly rising valuation and plans that could eventually lead to a public listing. Those shifts strengthen Musk’s claim that the dispute is about the soul of OpenAI; they also strengthen OpenAI’s argument that freezing or reversing the structure would jeopardise an organisation that now sits at the centre of the AI economy.
OpenAI has tried to turn the tables by portraying Musk not as a disappointed founder but as a rival competitor using litigation and public pressure to slow an adversary while building xAI. Reuters reported on 6 April that OpenAI had asked the attorneys general of California and Delaware to investigate what it described as Musk’s improper and anti-competitive conduct. That move added a regulatory edge to the legal fight and signalled that OpenAI is preparing not only to defend itself in court, but also to frame Musk’s campaign as an attempt to distort the competitive landscape around generative AI.
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