Kamal Ghorui
Elon Musk posted a pointed message on X this Monday ahead of what could be the biggest corporate trial in AI history: if he wins his $134 billion fraud lawsuit against OpenAI, every dollar goes to charity. None of it to him.“The proceeds of any legal victory in the OpenAI case will be donated to charity,” Musk wrote. “I will in no way enrich myself.”The post landed with the timing of a calculated courtroom step—Musk has long been accused of using the lawsuit to hobble a direct competitor to his own AI venture, xAI. The charity pledge was his most direct rebuttal yet to that narrative.
A $134 billion fight—and Musk says he doesn’t want the money
The trial, scheduled to begin April 28 in Oakland, centres on Musk’s claim that OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman defrauded him by steering the company away from its original nonprofit mission—after Musk donated roughly $38-45 million to it in the mid-2010s. His legal team is seeking up to $134 billion in damages, framed as “wrongful gains” harvested from his foundational early support.The damages figure rests on an analysis by economist C. Paul Wazzan of Berkeley Research Group, who concluded that Musk’s early contributions—financial donations, his co-founder role, and non-monetary backing—accounted for 50-75 per cent of the value of OpenAI’s nonprofit arm. That arm owns just over a quarter of the for-profit business, recently valued at $730 billion. Under Wazzan’s framework, OpenAI could owe Musk around $109 billion, with Microsoft on the hook for another $25 billion.OpenAI has pushed back hard on the methodology, arguing that donors to a nonprofit don’t hold an ownership interest and cannot claim a proportional share of commercial value generated later. The company’s lawyers tried to get Wazzan’s testimony thrown out entirely at a pre-trial hearing last Friday.The judge isn’t sold on the numbers—but the trial is going ahead anywayThey didn’t succeed. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers told the court she found Wazzan’s calculations unconvincing—the phrase “numbers out of the air” was hers—but declined to exclude his testimony on the basis of what she called “a five-page motion.” The jury will hear it, and she has indicated she will set the final damages figure herself after the verdict.The trial witness list reads like a Silicon Valley roll call: Altman, Musk, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and former board member Shivon Zilis are all expected to testify. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella may appear too.OpenAI’s counter-narrative is pointed. The company says Musk himself had agreed to a for-profit structure back in 2017, only withdrawing support after executives refused to hand him full control of the lab—and rejected his proposal to merge OpenAI with Tesla. It has called the lawsuit Musk’s “fourth attempt at these particular claims” and part of “a broader strategy of harassment” aimed at slowing it down while xAI gains ground.
