In the classic gangster movie "The Godfather", there is a line that has been passed down to this day - "This is not a personal grudge, this is a business."

But reality is often more complex. When business and personal grudges are mixed together, and when a person is both a co-founder in the past and the strongest competitor today, it is difficult to tell whether the complaint is a legal document or a belated letter of severance.

The most high-profile litigation battle in Silicon Valley and even the entire United States is undoubtedly the ongoing court battle between Musk and Altman.

Now, this "grievance" that has lasted for many years has finally reached its first stage of results.

On May 18, 2026 local time, in the San Francisco Federal Court, nine jurors took less than 2 hours to give their answer-Musk lost.

The grievances of 1 and 6 years have been decided

The jury's verdict was not complicated and even somewhat "technical."

The court did not directly answer Musk’s core accusation—whether OpenAI betrayed its original charitable mission when it separated its profitable business from its non-profit parent and introduced commercial investments such as Microsoft. The jury bypassed this "soul question" and dismissed all claims directly based on the statute of limitations.

California law requires that such claims be filed within three years of the relevant event. OpenAI opened up investment to Microsoft and gradually promoted commercialization transformation. These key nodes have been made public as early as around 2019. Musk did not formally sue until 2024, which the jury believed was beyond the legal deadline.

9 votes to 0. Passed unanimously.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said after the trial that there was a large amount of evidence to support the jury's verdict and said directly that she was ready to "dismiss on the spot" Musk's possible appeal motion. The simplicity of the wording is quite rare.

OpenAI's chief lawyer William Savitt's post-trial characterization directly penetrated the core of Musk's narrative - "This is not a technical decision, but a substantive decision. You filed the claim too late, and the reason for doing so is because you (Musk) are retaining these claims as a weapon that cannot compete with competitors in the market competition."

This sentence is very important. The subtext is that Musk is not a plaintiff, but a business rival who uses the judicial process as a knife.

2. Litigation or feud?

To understand the true logic of this lawsuit, we must go back to 2015.

That year, Musk, Altman, Greg Brockman and others co-founded OpenAI, which was clearly positioned as a non-profit organization with the mission of "developing safe artificial intelligence for all mankind." Musk provided a large amount of capital in the early stages and was deeply involved in discussions about the company's direction.

In 2018, he left the board of directors, citing "conflicts of interest with Tesla's business."

Everyone basically knows the story after that. OpenAI introduced Microsoft investment in 2019 and gradually established a "limited profit" hybrid structure. ChatGPT was born and its valuation has soared. Musk founded his own AI company xAI in 2023 and launched the Grok model to directly compete with OpenAI.

In 2024, the complaint was officially filed. Musk accuses Altman and Brockman of violating their original philanthropic commitments and ballooning their personal wealth by commercializing the company — "stealing from charity," as he used the term.

This narrative has a certain moral appeal, but the timeline betrays him.

The key decisions of OpenAI’s commercial transformation took place between 2019 and 2021. The entire process was open and transparent, and there were a lot of reports in the technology media. It’s not that Musk didn’t know about it, but he chose to play this card only after his competitors became bigger and during the most critical window period before the IPO.

Marc Toberoff, Musk's lawyer, still maintained his moral stance after the court - "This is a statement about OpenAI's abuse of charity. If it were not for Musk, they would get away with it." But they also announced that they would appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and this battle is obviously not really over.

3. Is OpenAI all bad news?

From OpenAI’s perspective, the significance of this judgment goes far beyond the law itself.

Wall Street analysts’ interpretation is the most direct. Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, pointed out that the biggest potential threat of this lawsuit is that it may force OpenAI to undergo a large-scale structural reorganization. If the court determines that the commercial transformation violates charitable fiduciary obligations, the entire company structure may face disruptive changes.

“Now, the worst-case scenario has basically been eliminated, which is a major benefit to OpenAI’s IPO.”

The Sword of Damocles, which had been hanging over my head for six years, fell to the ground within two hours.

OpenAI’s own business momentum is at its strongest moment in history. In the past two weeks, the company has released a series of signals intensively: the newly launched GPT-5.5 Instant has become the default model of ChatGPT, reducing the hallucination rate by more than 50% in high-risk scenarios; three real-time audio models for enterprise scenarios were simultaneously released, among which GPT-Realtime-Translate supports real-time translation in more than 70 languages; the Codex programming assistant has also been launched on the mobile side, allowing developers to review code and approve commands anywhere.

Meanwhile, in a new round of funding completed about two weeks ago, OpenAI raised $12.2 billion at a valuation of $852 billion, co-led by Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank and Microsoft. According to the latest data, the company’s monthly revenue has reached approximately US$2 billion and has more than 900 million weekly active users.

At this point, any legal risks that may lead to company restructuring will be the most dangerous variable in the IPO process, and the verdict has cleared this rock.

Microsoft's statement is also quite intriguing - "The facts and timeline of this case have always been clear, we welcome the jury's decision to reject these claims, and we continue to be committed to working with OpenAI." As OpenAI's largest external partner, Microsoft's words are calm and determined.

4. Questions that no one has answered

One thing that needs to be explained is that the result of the verdict should not be overly interpreted as a moral "not guilty verdict."

The reason for the jury's rejection was the statute of limitations, not "OpenAI did not betray its mission."

The court never gave an answer to the core question - a non-profit organization founded with the banner of "benefiting all mankind" turned into a business giant with a valuation of hundreds of billions, where did its founding spirit go?

This problem will not disappear just because a lawsuit is over.

In fact, as the OpenAI IPO window approaches, the company is quietly adjusting its structure and re-clarifying the relationship between the non-profit part and the profit-making entity. This is not a compromise with Musk, but a structural proposition that must be faced in the commercialization process of the entire AI industry.

The tension between technological idealism and business realism is the eternal underlying contradiction in Silicon Valley.

From the early days of Google’s “don’t be evil” to Facebook’s “connect the world” to OpenAI’s “for all mankind”, these noble narratives at the time of their creation have ultimately experienced varying degrees of deformation under the gravity of capital. Musk's anger, no matter what the motivation, actually touches on a real anxiety - when AI, a technology that may reshape civilization, is installed into a commercial company preparing for an IPO, what should we believe?

The court cannot give an answer to this question.

Musk announced his appeal and Altman won today, but the deeper debate about who should own and control AI has just entered a new stage.