Elon Musk at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference. Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The judge, however, said that the case would ‘benefit from an expedited trial’.
A federal judge has denied Elon Musk’s motion to stop OpenAI’s transformation into a for-profit entity, according to a fresh filing at the Northern District Court of California yesterday (4 March).
Ruling over the case, District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that the DOGE leader failed to prove that OpenAI violated its founding values by shifting to a for-profit structure. However, she said that the case would “benefit from an expedited trial”, which allegedly concerns public, and not private issues. It has been scheduled for later this year.
In the now denied motion with four separate requests for injunction, Musk’s lawyers claimed that OpenAI solicited donations from Musk of more than $44m, while agreeing to commit to keeping OpenAI a non-profit “for the good of the world”.
However, his lawyers were only able to supply email conversations between Musk and other OpenAI co-founders, including Sam Altman, and the court noted that no actual contract with such terms and conditions exists.
Moreover, Musk also alleged that OpenAI and its biggest investor Microsoft violated the US Sherman Act by commanding OpenAI investors to avoid investing in any competitors. Yet again, the court found that Musk did not provide sufficient evidence to prove this claim, nor was he able to prove that Microsoft colluded with OpenAI for the same.
Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Altman in March 2024 for not sticking to the company’s original objective of developing AI for the benefit of humanity, and naming Microsoft as a defendant in the case a few months later.
In September that year, reports emerged that OpenAI would be restructuring its business from a non-profit into a for-profit corporation. It was also reported that Altman would be receiving equity from the business, set to be valued at close to $150bn after the restructuring. Although, a spokesperson for the company told Reuters that the non-profit is “core” to OpenAI’s mission and would continue to exist.
Last month, Musk made an unsolicited bid to purchase the non-profit that controls OpenAI for almost $100bn. In response to the offer, Altman said, “no thank you” in a post on X, while offering to “buy Twitter for $9.74bn” instead.
Days later, a lawyer for Musk said that he will withdraw the offer if OpenAI’s board of directors agree to stop the planned conversion to a for-profit company. However, the recent failed motion for injunction seemingly takes some of the edge away from Musk’s bid to purchase the organisation.
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Elon Musk at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference. Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
