Three weeks of testimony in Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s Oakland courtroom end with Musk in Beijing on Trump’s state-visit delegation and deliberations beginning Monday.
Closing arguments in Musk v. Altman wrapped on Thursday afternoon in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s Oakland courtroom, sending the nine-person jury home for the weekend and into deliberations that begin Monday.
Three weeks of testimony, depositions, and a parade of Silicon Valley witnesses, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk himself, have reduced to two competing summary readings: that Altman and Brockman “stole a charity,” as Musk’s counsel told the jury, or that Musk “didn’t get his way at OpenAI,” as the defence framed it.
Musk was not in the room for the closing. His attorney issued an apology on his behalf to the jury, citing his presence on Donald Trump’s Beijing delegation, where he sat alongside Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, and Larry Fink for the parallel state visit.
The absence at the closing of the largest civil trial in his life is the kind of detail Musk’s legal team appears to have judged less damaging than the optics of skipping a Trump-led foreign trip.
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The case, as we have tracked since its opening in late April, turns on two claims: that OpenAI’s 2025 recapitalisation, which converted the original nonprofit into a more conventional capped-profit structure with a $350 billion valuation reading at the latest round, breached the charitable trust under which Musk made his roughly $38 million in early donations between 2015 and 2017; and that Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft were unjustly enriched in the process.
Microsoft is a co-defendant on an aiding-and-abetting theory. The most pointed piece of trial evidence, Brockman’s 2017 personal journal, described OpenAI’s nonprofit framing as “a lie.”
Musk is seeking up to $134 billion in disgorgement, none of which would go to him personally; he renounced personal benefit on the stand, framing the relief as a return to OpenAI’s nonprofit foundation.
He also asked the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles and to unwind the recapitalisation. Musk has framed the case as a precedent-setter on whether founders can pull a charity into a commercial vehicle without the original donors’ consent.
OpenAI’s defence rested on a narrower factual claim: that Altman and Brockman never made enforceable commitments to Musk about corporate structure, that Musk’s donations were spent on the research mission as agreed, and that the recapitalisation followed the legal procedure California’s attorney general has approved.
Microsoft’s counsel argued separately that its $13 billion of cumulative investment was the very thing that kept OpenAI alive long enough to build what Musk now wants returned, with Nadella’s trial testimony framing the deal as Microsoft’s defence against becoming “the next IBM.”
Two procedural points matter for how the verdict lands. The jury is technically advisory; Gonzalez Rogers retains the final say on remedies and has indicated she will likely follow the jury’s reading but is not bound to.
And the trial is structured in two phases, with liability decided first and remedies addressed in a separate proceeding, in which the judge alone decides what disgorgement, structural relief, or unwinding actually follows from any liability finding.
A jury finding for Musk on Monday or Tuesday does not, in itself, remove Altman from his job.
What the verdict will indicate, even at the liability stage, is whether the jurors are persuaded that nonprofit-to-profit conversions of the kind OpenAI executed are a category of corporate behaviour the courts should police.
The case has been described by both sides, with rare agreement, as one that will shape the next decade of governance for AI labs that started as charities and have ended as the most valuable private companies in the world. Anthropic and others have watched closely.
Deliberations begin Monday in Oakland. The remedies phase, if reached, would be heard by Gonzalez Rogers alone in a separate proceeding later this year.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
