The jury's swift rejection of Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI's co-founders and Microsoft confirmed what courtroom observers had already suspected: Musk's case was weak, largely because he waited far too long to bring it. During the closing arguments, OpenAI's legal team systematically explained how the law favored their client, while Musk's lawyers focused on Sam Altman's supposed lack of credibility and expressed disbelief that anyone could disagree with Musk's accusations. The result was that after the verdict, some people—including Musk himself—found it hard to believe he had lost. In a post he later deleted, Musk called Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers a “terrible activist Oakland judge,” then claimed “there is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity.”

However, Altman and Brockman weren't the only ones who benefited from OpenAI's non-profit investments. As much as Musk and his legal team tried to center the trial on Altman, the proceedings revealed just as much about Musk himself. One incident that emerged 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 to Tesla's headquarters to assist the autopilot team for a few weeks. “It was pretty clear that was not something we could say no to,” Brockman said. He described taking a team of leading scientists—including Andrej Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, and Scott Grey—to consult with the “demoralized” Tesla workers. They helped brainstorm ways to improve the vehicle's self-driving technology, with Sutskever telling the team that if they could find 10,000 images of a tricky corner case, they could fix their software. Musk even asked Brockman to recommend employees to fire, which he declined. Another person familiar with the episode confirmed Brockman's account and said Tesla did not reimburse OpenAI for the time and effort of its employees. Musk's family office, Excession, didn't respond to a request for comment. The core of Musk's case is that Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI committed a “breach of charitable trust”—that Musk donated funds for a specific charitable purpose, and his co-founders instead used them for something else. He also accuses them of “unjust enrichment” due to stock and other benefits from OpenAI's for-profit arm. In the case of the OpenAI scientists working at Tesla, Musk's charitable donations—which he deducted from his taxes—were used to hire scientists at a charity focused on securing the benefits of AGI. Then, he had those scientists work for free at his for-profit company.

It's true that the self-driving work involved artificial intelligence, but witnesses for Musk emphasized that Tesla's self-driving project was very different from OpenAI's research agenda. This is partly because Karpathy left OpenAI for Tesla shortly after this incident. OpenAI's 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. Another fact that likely 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 used good cop, bad cop tactics to convince his co-founders to let him have total control of OpenAI's for-profit affiliate—giving them free Teslas and threatening to withhold his donations. His efforts put his attorneys in a difficult position, as they had to convince the jury there was a significant difference between what Musk envisioned and the for-profit that was ultimately created. They suggested a “small adjunct” for-profit would be permissible, though OpenAI's witnesses showed that non-profits with large commercial arms are common. Indeed, there's a very plausible counterfactual where Musk accepted one of the offers his co-founders made to split their equity more evenly, and today he would be one of OpenAI's largest shareholders—just not the controlling one. But several times during the trial, Musk's associates testified that he refuses to invest in any business he cannot have sole control over.

The failure of Musk's claims because he filed them too late has been cited as a technicality, but the statute of limitations has real 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 unraveling all those decisions can outweigh any just reimbursement. No members of the jury have spoken about how they reached their verdict. However, they were asked to consider whether, before Aug. 5, 2021, Musk should have known that OpenAI was spending resources outside its mission or launching a for-profit affiliate. The answer to that is clear: Musk himself was doing those things.