Judge Rebukes Musk in OpenAI Trial Over Charity Claims

Elon Musk’s bid to recast OpenAI as a company that betrayed a charitable mission met a skeptical judge in federal court in Oakland, where U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers repeatedly pushed back on his presentation and warned him not to make the dispute worse outside the courtroom.

The exchange mattered because Musk is not just attacking OpenAI’s business model, he is trying to persuade a court that the company abandoned the promises that justified its early backing. When Musk repeated his line that OpenAI had been “stealing from a charity,” the judge cut him off with a blunt reminder: “You’re not a lawyer.” She also warned him to stop inflaming the case beyond the courthouse, a sign that the court views the public campaign around the lawsuit as part of the problem.

Musk testified for more than seven hours over three days, turning the trial into a test of whether his account of OpenAI’s origins still holds legal weight. He founded OpenAI in 2015 and filed the lawsuit in 2024, accusing the company of abandoning its nonprofit purpose and moving improperly toward profit-making. He has said roughly $38 million he donated to seed OpenAI was later used for unauthorized commercial purposes.

At trial, Musk framed the dispute as larger than one company. He told the court that the stakes reach the future of artificial intelligence and that the technology could “kill us all.” He also said he knew there had been early discussions about a for-profit structure, but maintained that Sam Altman reassured him OpenAI would remain a nonprofit. That claim goes to the center of the case: whether OpenAI’s founders and backers understood the organization as a charitable venture first, or whether commercialization was always part of the plan.

The judge’s reception of Musk has become part of the broader story. Her sharp interventions suggest the court is not treating his public rhetoric as proof. Instead, the proceedings have highlighted the tension between Musk’s warning that frontier AI poses existential risk and his own role as a billionaire operator building xAI while fighting the company behind ChatGPT. OpenAI’s future structure, including whether it can preserve nonprofit control while pursuing commercialization or a public offering, remains the core issue hanging over the trial.

The case has become a proxy battle over who gets to shape the rules of frontier AI. Musk is asking the court to enforce a charitable promise; OpenAI is defending its evolution into a more commercial enterprise. Judge Gonzalez Rogers has made clear that whatever happens to that fight, the courtroom will not become a stage for unchecked messaging.