{"id":728380,"date":"2026-05-20T00:00:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T21:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/elon-musk-said-sam-altman-stole-a-non-profit-but-the-trial-showed-he-had-similar-aims\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T00:00:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T21:00:27","slug":"elon-musk-said-sam-altman-stole-a-non-profit-but-the-trial-showed-he-had-similar-aims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/elon-musk-said-sam-altman-stole-a-non-profit-but-the-trial-showed-he-had-similar-aims\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk said Sam Altman “stole” a non-profit \u2014 but the trial showed he had similar aims"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The jury\u2019s speedy decision to reject Elon Musk\u2019s lawsuit against the other founders of OpenAI and Microsoft confirmed what we saw in the courtroom: Musk\u2019s case was a weak one, in part because he waited so long to file it.<\/p>\n

Watching the closing arguments last week, OpenAI\u2019s attorneys detailed point-by-point how the law was on their client\u2019s side, while the plaintiffs team focused on Sam Altman\u2019s app<\/a>arent lack of credibility and expressed disbelief that anyone would disagree with Musk\u2019s accusations.<\/p>\n

The final effect was that, after the verdict, some found it hard to believe Musk had lost \u2014 including the man himself. In a post he later deleted, Musk called Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers a \u201cterrible activist Oakland judge,\u201d then announced his plans to appeal, declaring \u201cthere is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Altman and Brockman weren\u2019t the only figures who benefitted from OpenAI\u2019s non-profit investments. As much as Musk and his legal team tried to make the trial about Altman, the proceedings revealed just as much about Musk himself.<\/p>\n

One incident that came out in court showed Musk benefiting from OpenAI in an uncomfortably familiar way. Greg Brockman testified that in 2017, Musk asked him to bring a team of OpenAI researchers down to Tesla\u2019s headquarters to help with the autopilot team for a few weeks. \u201cIt was pretty clear that was not something we could say no to,\u201d Brockman said.<\/p>\n

Brockman described taking a team of leading scientists, including Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, and Scott Grey, to consult with the \u201cdemoralized\u201d Tesla workers. They helped come up with ideas to improve the vehicle\u2019s self-driving technology<\/a>, with Sutskever telling the team that if they could find 10,000 images of a tricky corner case, they would be able to fix their software. Musk even asked Brockman to recommend employees to fire, which he declined to do.<\/p>\n

Another person familiar with the episode confirmed Brockman\u2019s account, and said Tesla did not reimburse OpenAI for the time and effort of its employees. Musk\u2019s family office, Excession, didn\u2019t reply to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

The heart of Musk\u2019s case is that Altman, Brockman and OpenAI committed a \u201cbreach of charitable trust\u201d \u2014 that Musk donated funds for a specific charitable purpose, and his cofounders instead used them for something else. He also accuses them of \u201cunjust enrichment\u201d due stock and other benefits from OpenAI\u2019s for-profit.<\/p>\n

In the case of the OpenAI scientists parachuting into Tesla, Musk\u2019s charitable donations were intended to hire scientists focused on securing the benefits of AGI. Instead, he had them work for free at his for-profit company.<\/p>\n

Dorothy Lund, a Columbia Law School professor and the co-host of the Beyond Unprecedented podcast<\/a>, told TechCrunch that this arrangement wouldn\u2019t be legal, calling it \u201ca bit rich for Musk to be suing for breach of a charitable trust, when he appears to have been redirecting assets in a way that was inconsistent with that mission.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that the self-driving work involved artificial intelligence, but witnesses for Musk emphasized that Tesla\u2019s self-driving project was very different from OpenAI\u2019s research agenda. That\u2019s in part because Karpathy left OpenAI for Tesla shortly after this incident. OpenAI\u2019s attorneys portrayed the departure as Musk violating his duty to the lab, where he was co-chair of the board, by recruiting one of its key researchers to his own company.<\/p>\n

The other fact that no doubt influenced the jury was the amount of time Musk spent trying to gain sole control of a potential OpenAI for-profit affiliate in 2017. Musk deployed good cop, bad cop tactics in an attempt to convince his cofounders to let him have total control of OpenAI\u2019s for-profit affiliate \u2014 giving them free Teslas, and threatening to withhold his donations.<\/p>\n

His efforts put his attorneys in a tricky spot, facing a need to convince the jury there was a significant difference between what Musk envisioned, and the for-profit that was ultimately created. They suggested a \u201csmall adjunct\u201d for-profit would be permissible, though OpenAI\u2019s witnesses showed non-profits with large commercial arms are common.<\/p>\n

Indeed, there\u2019s a very plausible counter-factual where Musk took one of the offers his cofounders made to split their equity more evenly, and finds himself today as one of OpenAI\u2019s largest shareholders \u2014 just not the controlling one. But several times during the trial, Musk\u2019s associates testified that he refuses to invest in any business he could have sole control over. <\/p>\n

The failure of Musk\u2019s claims because he filed them too late has been cited as a technicality, but the statute of limitations has substance behind it: People and businesses make important decisions and spend resources based on their understanding that what they are doing is permissible. If someone like Musk waits too long to sue, then the cost of unravelling all those decisions can outweigh a just reimbursement.<\/p>\n

No members of the jury have spoken about how they arrived at their verdict. However, they were asked to consider if, before Aug. 5, 2021, Musk should<\/em> have known that OpenAI was spending resources outside its mission or launching for-profit affiliate. The answer to that is clear: Musk himself was doing those things.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

If you want to read more like this article, you can visit our Technology<\/a><\/span> category.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The jury\u2019s speedy decision to reject Elon Musk\u2019s lawsuit against the other founders of OpenAI and Microsoft confirmed what we saw in the courtroom: Musk\u2019s case was a weak one, in part because he waited so long to file it. Watching the closing arguments last week, OpenAI\u2019s attorneys detailed point-by-point how the law was on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":728381,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/musk-court-2273245544.jpg?resize=1200,801","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[77337,39394,141199,143139,36402],"class_list":["post-728380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-elon-musk","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman","tag-tesla"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=728380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/728381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=728380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=728380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=728380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}