Jury selection opened on April 27 in federal court in Oakland, California, in the civil trial pitting Elon Musk against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over the company’s transformation from a nonprofit research lab into a for-profit enterprise worth approximately $852 billion.
Summary
- Jury selection began April 27 in Oakland before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in a trial expected to last four weeks.
- Musk is seeking to force the return of profits to OpenAI’s nonprofit arm, strip Altman and Greg Brockman of their positions, and reverse the for-profit conversion he argues was illegal.
- Scheduled witnesses include Musk, Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and current and former OpenAI board members, with a remedies phase set for May 18 if the court finds liability.
The Musk OpenAI trial opened on April 27 in Oakland’s federal district court, with jury selection beginning in a civil case that Yahoo Finance reported carries the potential to determine OpenAI’s corporate structure at precisely the moment the company is preparing for a blockbuster IPO. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding, has described the case as “billionaire vs. billionaire” and will retain ultimate authority over any remedies, with the nine-person jury serving in an advisory capacity only.
Musk OpenAI Civil Trial Puts the Future of the Company on the Stand
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman and a small group of others as a nonprofit organization explicitly committed to developing AI for the benefit of humanity rather than shareholders. He claims he donated more than $44 million under that premise and that Altman subsequently manipulated the company into a for-profit structure to enrich himself and others, in what Musk’s lawyers called “perfidy and deceit of Shakespearean proportions.” NPR reported that OpenAI’s current valuation sits at approximately $852 billion according to the company’s own court filings, with close to a billion people using its products weekly, making the remedies Musk is seeking among the most consequential ever sought in a Silicon Valley civil case. OpenAI has dismissed the litigation as a campaign driven by jealousy and competitive spite, arguing that Musk was aware of and at times advocated for the for-profit conversion, and that he pushed to fold OpenAI into Tesla before leaving the board in 2018 after a power struggle.
What a Musk Victory Would Mean for OpenAI’s IPO Ambitions
The trial arrives at what may be OpenAI’s most commercially exposed moment. As crypto.news reported, a finding against OpenAI in the Musk lawsuit could disrupt SoftBank’s commitment to OpenAI’s $40 billion funding round, which was already reported to be at risk of shrinking from $30 billion to $20 billion if the company’s restructuring faced legal interference. OpenAI completed a recapitalization in October 2025 that left the nonprofit with a controlling stake in the for-profit business, a structure the attorneys general of California and Delaware approved. Among the remedies Musk is seeking is the forced return of all profits from the for-profit conversion to OpenAI’s charitable foundation, and the removal of Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman as officers. A finding of liability would trigger a separate remedies phase before Judge Gonzalez Rogers alone, beginning May 18.
The Broader AI Governance Question Behind the Lawsuit
Musk has framed the case as having implications well beyond OpenAI. In court filings, he argued that OpenAI’s conduct “could represent a paradigm shift for technology start-ups,” claiming that if allowed to stand, the structural conversion sets a precedent for how AI safety commitments made during nonprofit fundraising can be abandoned for commercial gain. As crypto.news documented, OpenAI has been rapidly expanding its commercial infrastructure into financial services, advertising, and enterprise AI tooling throughout 2026, moves that reinforce how far the company has moved from its founding safety-first mandate. Musk himself has since launched xAI, a for-profit AI competitor, which OpenAI cites as evidence that his lawsuit is commercially rather than ethically motivated. As crypto.news tracked, OpenAI crossed $10 billion in annual revenue in mid-2025 and is projecting close to $30 billion in 2026, a commercial scale that makes the question of who controls the company’s mission more consequential than at any prior point in its history.
Opening arguments are scheduled to follow jury selection on April 27, with the trial expected to run approximately four weeks before the advisory jury delivers its liability finding to Judge Gonzalez Rogers.
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