After less than two hours of deliberation on Monday, a jury in Oakland rejected Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI and its leaders CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman.
The jury found that Musk had filed his claims for breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment too late and that they are therefore barred by the statute of limitations.
Musk’s claims against Microsoft for aiding and abetting also failed because, without the claim for breach of charitable trust, the aiding and abetting claim also failed.
The unanimous ruling by the six-woman, three-man jury came quickly after deliberation over a trial record that contained 11 days of live testimony from more than 20 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits.
The jury’s verdict was read by the court clerk in front of U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, in the federal courthouse in Oakland where she has presided over the trial that began April 27. While the jury was technically an “advisory jury” and Gonzalez Rogers not bound to follow its determination, she accepted the verdict.
The jury’s decision came at the close of the “liability phase” of the trial during which the jury evaluated Musk’s claims that the OpenAI defendants, aided and abetted by Microsoft, breached the charitable trust allegedly created by Musk’s $38 million donations to the nonprofit, and were “unjustly enriched” by doing so. Musk claimed that the defendants collectively should cough up $134 billion in ill-gotten gains.
A second phase to determine what damages, if any, resulted from the claims, was underway at the time of the ruling and will not be continued.
The case — sometimes billed as “the trial of the century” — attracted global attention, fueled by the celebrity of the controversial plaintiff, the staggering amount of money involved and a technology predicted to cause as profound a change in modern life as the internet or the printing press.
Because the case was dismissed on the grounds of the statute of limitations, the jury did not determine the substance of Musk’s allegations.