Because no one has commented yet on the legal significance:
Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Because the statute of limitations is a precondition, the jury was not asked to find any other facts. They may tell the press what they thought on other issues, or they may not.
The judge was prepared to immediately accept the jury’s finding, and said she agreed that the jury’s decision was supported by the evidence.
It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely. Whether Musk’s claims are barred by the statute of limitations is a quintessential question of fact, and appellate courts are extraordinarily deferential to factual findings by juries so as a practical matter it’s almost impossible to appeal this verdict.
If I had been on the jury, I would have found against Musk on every point.
His lawyers created a “3 phases of doubt” to try and sidestep the statute of limitations, but it was clearly bogus and he was on notice of OpenAI creating a for-profit in 2019.
Musk was perfectly happy to have OpenAI be a for-profit, a non-profit with an attached for-profit (the current structure), or even just absorbed into Tesla. His complaints fell flat for me given the number of emails where he said that a non-profit was likely a mistake.
This is technical, but Musk clearly never created a charitable trust, which was a precondition for his claims. His funds were donated for general use by OpenAI, not for any specific use that would allow him to claim breach of charitable trust. Also, all of his funds were spent by no later than 2020 which is before his alleged breach in 2023.
Musk unreasonably delayed bringing this case until the success of ChatGPT and starting a competing AI company, and he had unclean hands because he attempted to sabotage OpenAI repeatedly by poaching its key staff while on the board.
Musk should have just made another company and then he’d have another 500 billion but he had that mistake and now it’s over. Then again we’ll see how well open ai does over the long term
Evidence at trial showed that Musk attempted to pursue AGI at Tesla starting in 2017 before he left the board of OpenAI. He was unsuccessful in that endeavor and later restarted his efforts in xAI after the success of ChatGPT.
Musk leaves the board in 2018 I think. And something happens in DX-754 where they've pivoted to AI in SpaceX around then too. I had a lot of trouble telling what "AI" meant in late 2017 at Tesla.
---
Sept 1, 2017 DX-669: Funding paused confirmation. Elon is still on the board for a while. DX-707 specifies the board as of Sept 26, 2017, and even suggests adding Shivon, Jared, Sam Teller.
Jan 31, 2018 DX-748: Elon is still discussing things with Greg. Elon: "The only paths I can think of are a major expansion of OpenAI and a major expansion of Tesla AI. Perhaps both simultaneously"
Feb 3, 2018 DX-754: Sam Teller says Elon "just suggested we use SpaceX email for AI stuff so switching over to that"
Feb 4, 2018 DX-755: Sam Teller and Shivon Zilis discuss disabling Openai
Feb 20, 2018 DX-770: Elon officially leaves board (first document I see specifying)
This is not about money for him, this was always about control. When they wouldn't give him complete control over the project, he pulled out and probably expected OAI to fold without his support. But they survived, and he eventually realised that he had made a huge mistake by giving up all of his influence over SOTA AI research.
I think you are referring to a tweet on March 16th where he said "Btw, the proceeds of any legal victory in the OpenAI case will be donated to charity. I will in no way enrich myself." Not during the trial, not a donation to OpenAI's charity, and obviously not meaningful given his track record of not following through on public statements.
Thanks, couldn't find this. This is essentially a proposal to the court about how the case could be resolved though, not a promise, and he only proposed it after the judge denied his original proposal (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Musk-...), which was "give me $134 billion". I think it would have been a little more credible if he had requested this originally.
Even taking it at face value, it's just an idea for the judge to consider, not legally binding for anybody.
I genuinely don't know how to make a non-sarcastic statement about Mr. Elon Musk's promises.
I especially struggle to not make a Venn diagram of people who still take Mr. Musk's promises seriously, and current state of American politics.
I simply cannot make a sentence about Mr. Musks promises that will pass Hacker News guidelines of being serious and productive.
...And that's how I feel about Mr. Musks promises, particularly those regarding donations and charities. I think the only way that promise by Mr Musk could've been made stronger, is if it were a Twitter poll :).
Each buck we spend is a vote for a business (which is a bag of ideals and methods) It is surprising that people apparently desire a future where they don't even have to bother listening to those in charge as every word is completely irrelevant. I had considered they don't understand capitalism is quite open to influence but they also do it in elections.
I share all the disillusionment and cynicism about Musk, shared here by others.
But he has also done amazing things. And when someone declares they are going to create a Martian colony, something literally "out of this world", and against all odds makes unbelievable progress over many years, including increasingly re-usable rockets that return and land vertically, substantially more efficient powerful engines, and faster turn operations all around, meanwhile making orbital travel mundane, hanging a criticism of schedules on the weak hook of "yet" is myopic.
Does anyone seriously still believe this? I thought as a society we had realized Musk is simply BSing whatever he feels like until it becomes untenable.
I do. It’s not his singular focus. But he continues to personally invest himself in pushing the boundaries of human spacefaring capability. That goal seems more meaningful to him that it does to e.g. Bezos, who seems to have a rocket company to look cool.
It’s in his own biography (the older one) that spacex would pursue mars without distraction. That he went to great lengths to ensure it wouldn’t be used for military, tourism, etc.
You can’t believe musk without simultaneously believing he’s a liar. It’s in HIS fucking book.
> It’s in his own biography (the older one) that spacex would pursue mars without distraction. That he went to great lengths to ensure it wouldn’t be used for military, tourism, etc.
I said I believe he wants to go to Mars and will put in the work to make that happen. I didn't say everything he's said is true. Musk absolutely lies. But his actions speak pretty consistently to Mars being a real goal.
I know there's a risk when Musk's name comes up that everyone takes "all against" or "all for" approach - very polarising figure.
But I see a lot of that announcement, and the others someone else pointed to as his "aspirational, but ultimately never going to happen" goals - whether he believes the claims are achievable, or not, he says these things to energise people to working/paying for him to try
It costs him little to nothing to say, and other people's time, effort, and capital to try (and succeed/fail)
Tesla is falling to pieces now, and SpaceX is getting loaded up with completely unrelated projects (xAI) in order to try and make it look saleable (I guess) - it's very difficult to see the Mars announcement as anything but hype.
That all depends on how much he values his credibility, I think..
But to be fair, for someone as good at self promotion as he is, I can believe that the value of the hype could be greater than the cost in credibility.
Year over year sales are declining. Stratospheric stock price is propped up by promise of selling humanoid robots, a technology (and market) which are unproven.
Having approximately $44 billion in cash on hand is not a massive cash reserve for any company with the market cap of Tesla ($1.3 trillion). Even less so when you realize how capital intensive its current car and non-existent robot business is… The entire EV market is risky right now for margin compression as Chinese EV manufacturers are really pulling ahead. It’s pretty wild to see just how far they’ve progressed while the west mostly does nothing. Even Tesla hasn’t provided any real innovation in years in regards to their core business. And from what I can tell, they’re pretty much outright ignoring their auxiliary businesses.
If Optimus fails to impress, and gain traction, I’d seriously expect Tesla to end up a subsidiary of SpaceX within the next ten years as Elon tries to protect up his net worth.
> It’s pretty wild to see just how far they’ve progressed while the west mostly does nothing.
The “west” came up with Tesla and Rivian, and their cars are on the road. And the US tariffed chinese EVs. What else can be done to combat China’s lower priced labor and possibly more lax environmental regulations?
> difficult to see the Mars announcement as anything but hype
Oh yeah, the announcement is hype. But there is actual work underneath it making real progress in science and engineering that moves us closer to Mars. Some of that, moreover, is work that has limited appeal outside a Martian context.
This is a joint project of U.S. government military planners and an ostensible private individual. If Elon disappeared, rest assured, the contracts and development would still happen.
They want mega constellations for always-on drone guidance and for "golden dome" which would allow for the laser-based shoot-down of long range exo-atmospheric missiles. You need reusable spacecraft to make that tenable. This is not about Mars, don't buy the marketing. At best for civilians, this is about making broadband widely available such that America can dominate internet connectivity going forward and increase spying further. As an example, examine a map of Starlink connectivity, you will notice that Russia and Gaza are excluded.
The Artemis missions will eventually enable the placement of communications equipment on the moon, making anti-satellite weapons less effective at disrupting critical communications.
Fortress America will be invincible forever, so so they desire. The macroeconomics are not working out for them though even though the technological edge is still working for them on that level.
> They want mega constellations for always-on drone guidance and for "golden dome" which would allow for the laser-based shoot-down of long range exo-atmospheric missiles
This is a conspiracy theory folks who just Googled In-Q-Tel have been stringing together since Covid. It's not true.
> examine a map of Starlink connectivity, you will notice that Russia and Gaza are excluded
Russia wasn't excluded until recently. That was a problem!
> The Artemis missions will eventually enable the placement of communications equipment on the moon, making anti-satellite weapons less effective at disrupting critical communications
Communications are an exception to the lunar treaty that governs the militarization of space.
Don't forget that the original space program was designed to peacefully demonstrate a high degree of control over ICBM class rockets. They're so good and accurate, we can put a human on top of one. The government does not spend huge amounts of money on things like "art" or "science" without a motivating factor. This is the capitalist empire, not socialism.
> pushing the boundaries of human spacefaring capability
I guess polluting space with shitty satellites and causing environmental disasters with failed and questionably-permitted rocket launches is, technically, pushing on boundaries of human spacefaring capability.
> guess polluting space with shitty satellites and causing environmental disasters with failed and questionably-permitted rocket launches is, technically, pushing on boundaries of human spacefaring capability
My cat is both cute and fluffy as well as a menace.
I mean, I really dislike what Musk has become but SpaceX has brought about a huge leap in access to space. Last year they launched more than the rest of the world combined, including the rest of the US. They now own more operating satellites than the rest of the world combined. When the rest of the Western world's launchers have had problems over the last few years (Ariane, Vulcan, EU Soyuz, New Glenn, Antares) SpaceX has been able to absorb their payloads with relative ease rather than waiting many years for other arrangements. They've saved the US many $Bs in launch costs by undercutting the incumbent monopoly. Cheaply and easily reusing a rocket was thought impossible, now it's routine and every rocket maker on earth is attempting to copy them.
If you look at their filings, they are now pivoting into an "AI company". (Meaning, that's where the majority of their future value is described as coming from.) It's possible that this is a harmless investor swindle and they'll keep relentlessly innovating. But you should probably be worried.
Musk is like that person on Facebook you know that is really good at <welding / programming / performing surgeries / etc> then they post about their thoughts on some other topic and all you can respond with is “stay in your lane.”
Musk has been successful is pure engineering efforts led by engineers he hired achieving the next big-but-not-too-big step.
I genuinely believe he wants to go to Mars. Desperately.
He's fundamentally a very smart socially inept largely sociopathic emotionally immature obsessively driven boy who read a lot of Heinlein as a kid. Everything about him indicates he sees himself as a saviour of humanity and the only person who has their priorities right and everybody should appreciate and adore him and it's so darn frustrating when they don't, oh wait this other party will adore me, now they don't anymore either oh HUMbug.
Do I believe any of his promises? No absolutely not. But I do think Mars is his massive obsession and that he fervently (If completely Implausibly) believes it'll work and help humanity.
Every <unit of currency> not in your pocket is in someone else’s. Greedy narcissists can’t stand that, they need to have it all. They don’t need the extra 500 billion to spend it, they need it so the number goes up. They need to be number one. At everything. Remember when Musk lied about being one of the top players for some difficult video game, then it turned out he was paying someone else to play for him? It’s just an ego thing, which I agree is baffling.
So what to do to be happy? Extreme wealth removes most practical goals like buying things or going places and doing things. Not that you can't do them, but it's not a meaningful goal to work towards.
They have to create their own meaning, whatever that is.
A billionaire trying to create purpose for themselves can be boring, or weird. Which one gets media coverage?
Gates Foundation, Zukerberg's fitness craze, MacKenzie Scott's philanthropy, Bezos and Musk's [whateverness] are all just variations on a theme. And like all people, some will be better at it than others.
Note though, that they will do what it takes to stay wealthy because what would they be without that?
Greedy narcissists are lacking in empathy, that’s what makes them greedy narcissists.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be empathetic, of course. Someone else’s lack of empathy does not excuse our own. However, consider that billionaires mostly reach that status by exploiting others. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, they all fit that mould. Being empathetic does not mean being a chump. I’m not going to shed a tear for the poor exploitative billionaire who underpays and overworks people to the point they literally die on the floor of their warehouses and others around them are ordered to keep working.
If given the choice to defend the one billionaire who is fucking up the world and billions of lives in the process, or those who are being exploited by said billionaire, I think it’s obvious where one should place their empathy.
It’s not my responsibility, or yours, or anyone but themselves, that they can’t find meaning in life without being massive assholes. Use some of that money to go to therapy. Use it to enhance the lives of others around you, improve your community and you improve your own well being. It’s not that hard, we’ve known for a long time that a way to happiness is to do things for others.
Musk himself has lamented that money does not buy happiness, and after that expressed the desire to become the first trillionaire. I mean, come on…
I wasn't trying to say all billionaires deserve an outpouring of defence for their actions. Merely that their actions are as human as the rest of us, just in a different context.
And like the rest of us, there are those who cope better or worse, who are morally better or worse. Police are another bunch of people judged similarly.
Which is to say, there are indeed woeful billionaires. Possibly most of them. But don't paint the humans all with the same brush, even if the way to fix society might be to do so legally.
Because money is just a proxy for power, and the goal is not to have cash, it is to have power. Perhaps via being able to make decisions at various businesses, or being able to travel to a different planet, or being able to influence other people, etc.
Could also partly be a curiosity to see what one is capable of, or maybe wanting to be known for helming an organization that accomplishes xyz.
That's the difference between builders and consumers. People who are mostly consumers have a realistic number where they could stop contributing to society. Smalltime builders can imagine a lot of wealth, but at a certain point don't want to get too big. Big Dreamers are only limited by what they can imagine and make happen, and only infinite capital, labor, and time could achieve their dreams. Once you surround yourself with people dreaming of humans as multiplanetary, earthly levels of labor and wealth are obviously not going to make it happen.
I wasn't trolling, but I have unfortunately deviated from the topic.
What isn't fine is my belief that I'm going to be rug-pulled by my government. From multiple sources I believe New Zealand will tax most savings to smithereens. The lie is that I should save for retirement; when any savings will be taken from me over time via a variety of mechanisms including taxes.
Both our Labour (leftish) and National parties will screw me.
The underlying issue is that our demographics leave little choice to the government. The majority of voters are naturally happy to take everything from everyone who has more than them. Voters are selfish.
I was trying to make a argument based on marginal economics. NZ should be encouraging me to increase my income from export earnings: instead it drastically discourages me. I helped found a startup, so I deeply understand the multiple ways our government discourages us from earning export income. My marginal utility from an extra dollar is already drastically diminished because I already have enough to enjoy my life. The >40% taxation on top (incl GST) reduces my motivation to earn money for NZ to nearly zero. I am not a money chaser and I dislike investing.
After some threshold, money as a marginal value becomes meaningless because other non-monetary factors like politics dominate. It seems like nobody cares how much society profits from you - they only care about their own selfish goals.
I'd argue that if we don't abstract away resource usage behind currency, we are pretty firmly in negative-sum territory and zero-sum is a pretty rose colored glasses way of looking at things that is currently obscuring us from pending horrors.
These people aren't satisfied with themselves having more, everyone else must have less too.
Not that I am interested in changing your mind on this. I would, though, encourage you to actually say it's "positive-sum" if that's what you believe instead of hinting and then being vague about it for some reason.
You can't just apply One Simple Rule like this ("more money is always better" / "more money never makes a difference"). There is, objectively, an amount of money above which another dollar, or another billion, will never make a meaningful difference in your overall lifestyle[0].
The amount isn't a single bright line, but like with so many things, there's an area below it where extra money unquestionably improves your quality of life, and an area above it where it unquestionably doesn't.
[0] unless "your lifestyle" involves manipulating major governments and controlling the way people the world over think, which I wouldn't consider a legitimate part of "lifestyle"
I think this is missing the main point that Musk was never the owner of OpenAI, neither was Sam, nor the employees. The owners are the American people. I presume Musk got a tax rebate from his donation, courtesy of the taxpayer; so did every other donor.
The fact is, OpenAI was a non-profit belonging to the public and it was appropriated by the donors... Who already got their tax cuts.
This is setting a precedent that if you donate a certain amount of money to a charity, you can later convert it to a for-profit and claim to be an owner of the charity... On the basis of 'donations' which you got a tax rebate from. Very convenient.
OpenAI donors should have created a new, separate, for-profit entity completely distinct from OpenAI, with a different name, poached the original employees, implemented all the logic from scratch, collected all the training data from scratch... This would have been correct. Basically what Anthropic did seems more like the correct way.
OpenAI Foundation is a corporation established in Delaware. It has received it's 501(c)3 status from the IRS which means donations are deductible to the fullest extent of the law (or some such; it's been a long time since I've had to write that). The American people do not own the foundation.
As for the OpenAI that is a public benefits corporation, I know nothing about all the ins and outs of that type of corporation.
I don't think you understand how non-profits work. Essentially they are exactly the same as for-profits, except they can't issue dividends. Ownership works exactly the same as for-profit companies.
A cynical take is that non-profits are for-salary; they still pay their owners, just using other means.
edit: no, my bad, apparently I misunderstood how non-profits work in the USA. Thanks for the correction :)
This is not correct. jongjong is correct that a nonprofit does not have owners in the sense that a for-profit has owners. Nonprofits are dedicated to their mission, and are run by a board of directors.
You cannot have a % ownership in a nonprofit because its resources must be used exclusively to carry out its mission. You could have a % control in its decision making process.
The intellectual property (code, data) was transferred from the nonprofit to the for-profit for about $60M, which is what an independent firm hired to assess the value said the IP was worth in late 2018 / early 2019. The nonprofit itself was never converted to a for-profit, and indeed remains a nonprofit to this day.
The $60M in IP has grown to about a $200B stake in the OpenAI for-profit.
I'm unfamiliar with the US legal system but do they really need a jury and a trial to determine whether the claims are barred by the statute of limitations? Couldn't this be decided by a judge before trial?
Part of the Statute of Limitations isn't just on when he filed the claim, but when he found out or should have found out, by reasonable diligence that he had a claim at all.
So the question before the jury has a significant component of "Should he have found out by this time?" Which is a question of fact, and facts are typically decided by juries, in the US at least.
The two parties can agree together to let a judge decide facts like this, but generally, if one or the other party wants it to go to a jury, it does.
I'm guessing part of Musk's strategy was to have it go to the jury, which are often seen as easier to manipulate than judges, especially when a case is weak. Or perhaps his team already knew this particular judge would be inclined to rule against him, so did the next best thing.
Also, it's worth pointing out that the jury was obviously correct. Musk was lying his ass off. There is no possible way to imagine that Elon Musk, the hyper-online dude obsessed with news, AI, and AI news, would not be aware of the well-publicized events of a company he was personally massively invested in.
Elon argued that even though the events in question took place sometime between 2017 and 2020 OpenAI intentionally hid the information from him until 2022-2023 which is why he wasn't able to file the lawsuit until 2024.
That's what the jury found against - they said he was reasonably informed enough to have brought the suit earlier and thus the 3 year clock should start ticking in 2020 not 2023.
Bit late, but since I don’t see any correct answers here - no a jury is not required here. The judge chose to convene an *advisory* jury here — likely to strengthen the factual findings of the court and maybe to save the court itself some time/effort.
In the US, judges make determinations of law, but juries (in a jury trial at least) must evaluate the evidence to make findings of fact. So the jury would need to make a finding as to when the statute of limitations started ticking based on the evidence, and the judge then makes the legal determination that the statutory period has lapsed.
In the US (I believe all common law systems), the jury is the trier of fact. If there is a genuine factual dispute between the two parties in a lawsuit, then that dispute is resolved by a jury (unless the parties opt-out).
Statutes of limitations are usually not tried by juries because the underlying facts that cause them to kick in are usually not in actual dispute. Instead a fight over statute of limitation is more likely to be over which statute applies or whether some other mitigating circumstance is kicking in, which are matters of law which do not go to a jury.
If it’s a very clear fact yes a judge can make the call. In this case what Musk knew was part of that and a jury then had to make the call on what the fact was.
It’s quite an odd ruling given that OpenAI completed its for profit “conversion” last fall.
It seems the biggest value loss to the nonprofit was in this conversion, not in the initial for profit subsidiary creation giving investors capped profit shares.
Correct, Musk based his claims on the 2023 Microsoft deal.
The 2025 recapitalization was discussed at trial, but it was ancillary since all that changed was the existing for-profit changed from a capped-profit with weird cash flow mechanics to a traditional public benefit corp with ordinary equity.
> Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims.
I think Musk's lawyers told him he'd probably lose this suit before he filed it. I suspect he proceeded mostly out of spite and to embarrass Altman by ensuring the concerns even his friends had about his candor and trustworthiness went on the record and were splashed across the media. Musk knew he had little chance of unwinding the theft of a non-profit (and I doubt he cared much about that).
It would have been much better if Musk had actually cared enough about OAI's original mission to bring suit in 2019. However, I'm still glad Musk did this now because Altman and Brockman (with the help of MSFT and others) DID steal a non-profit, or at least subverted it's mission. And this fleeting bit of public embarrassment (funded by Musk for other spiteful reasons) is the only penalty they'll ever see.
The guy he's suing is also a billionaire who can keep his enemies tied up in court needlessly until the day he dies, although that billionaire's net worth is only around 1% of Elon Musk's, so in a sense you're right that Musk is picking on the little guy.
For people unfamiliar, generally speaking in trial courts the jury is the finder of facts and the judge is the finder of law (yes, there are bench trials where the judge does both). As an aside, appeals courts deal in legal issues (ie statutory interpretations and constitutional issues).
So not being within the statute of limitations is typically a legal issue so what must've happened here is the jury would've been asked if the earlier OpenAI-MS deals were substantially similar to the latest deal. I can't find the verdict form or the jury instructions but I'll bet that was the key issue the jury decided.
That fact here was if Musk should have known about the potential breach of charitable trust before 2021 given it started in 2019, if not before, with Microsoft investment and he didn't sue until 2024. There is a 3 year statute of limitations.
>Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Why is a hypothetical ground for this decision? "You didn't complain immediately the first time you got robbed, therefore all the robbing since then is covered by a statute of limitation".
The statute of limitations exists to prevent unreasonable delay, to protect defendants from prejudice due to loss of evidence to the passage of time, and to recognize that people who are injured tend to complain immediately and not sit on their claims.
This case demonstrates why. Musk only complained after OpenAI was commercially successful with ChatGPT and after he started a competing effort. He repeatedly said “I do not know” and “I do not recall” on the stand, and argued that the passage of time made it hard for him to remember facts that would have been helpful for OpenAI.
I know why statutes of limitation exist. I was wondering why it applied here. Apparently it wasn't completely straightforward, as nine jurors were needed to reach a decision on that point, instead of a single judge or even clerk.
Whether the claim accrued before the statute of limitations expired is a question of fact, and is therefore reserved for the fact-finder which in this case was the jury.
IMHO, whether (and which) statue of limitations applies is a question of law, whether said time limit has passed is a question of fact. I'd like to read the jury instructions and verdict, but I didn't see a link to them anywhere.
I guess there could be a question of fact in a case where the statues of limitation differ for different injuries, and the factual question is which injury was it.
You are correct that which statute of limitations applies is a question of law. If facts are undisputed, that is the end of the issue. In this case, the facts were disputed, and the jury found for the defendants.
The jury instructions are public and the final jury form will be published, likely later this week.
I can tell you that the instructions told the jury to decide whether Musk could have brought his case before 2021.
It seems to me like justice should be about right vs wrong and illegal vs legal, and not “did you fill out form 27B/6 on time?” Dismissing a case on these kinds of trivial procedural grounds seems like the court just doesn’t want to do its job.
Have you ever gotten into a fender bender and not had insurance involved? After resolving that situation, do you think it would be "justice" for the person you got into the fender bender with to come after you 20 years after the fact demanding compensation for 20 years of medical bills that they swear is related to injuries sustained in that horrific crash that you negligently caused? How would you even begin to construct a defense for yourself? Even assuming you still had the car, what is the likelihood it's in the same condition it was after that collision? How likely is it that you have a perfect 20 years of maintenance and repair records for that car? How likely is it that you have any evidence about what medications or substances you were or were not taking 20 years ago? How likely is it you could find any witnesses to the wreck from 20 years ago?
At a certain point, "justice" is deciding that it is impossible to fairly and reasonably adjudicate the dispute in question, and that it is better to have let a guilty person go free than to punish an innocent person. Statutes of limitation are one part of that package of procedures we have in place to make the process as fair and equitable as possible.
The statute of limitations is not a trivial issue. Defendants have rights just as much as plaintiffs do, and our justice system does not allow plaintiffs to unreasonably delay in bringing their claims.
there are also practical concerns at play with a statute of limitations, where evidence is more likely to disappear and the trial would've devolved into a he said/she said situation.
If it was wrong in 2019, why did he wait 7 years to do something about it?
The passage of time makes it harder to have a fair trial, as shown by the number of times Elon said I don't know or I don't recall about conversations that would have been recent in 2019 but are now long (or strategically) forgotten.
Bringing claims promptly so they can be adjudicated is vital for justice. What would you think if you were sued for something that happened decades ago when the time to correct it was soon after the instigating event?
Because civil cases are based on the preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt, plaintiffs have a much lower bar to clear for winning. However, because of the ease that they may win, there needs to be protections for defendants to ensure that it's fair. If you show up with yellowed documents claiming the defendant did something yet the defendant has, reasonably, lost the records that could disprove the claim, why should the plaintiff have the advantage? If the only thing you need to win an ancient lawsuit is to just hold onto records longer than the other guy, that's not an effective system.
It doesn't seem trivial at all. Allowing to flout procedure specially in case of very rich , powerful people with vast resources at their disposal would feel rewarding further for their cluelessness as if they are not already heavily rewarded by rigged system.
Because there has to be some point. It's unjust to allow someone to sue 30 years later, as everyone would have a sword of Damocles hanging over their head waiting for the right moment to strike. And in general, if you didn't realize you were robbed for 3 years, perhaps it's the case that you weren't actually robbed.
Statute of limitations kicks in at the moment of your awareness of the watch being fake. But, you and the plaintiff might dispute over the fact of when you learned the watch was fake. That’s exactly what this jury decision was about. Musk claimed he wasn’t aware of OpenAI’s for profit push until 2022. Altman claimed he was aware of it as far back as 2017 or 2019. The Jury looked at texts and emails and interviewed witnesses and decided that Musk was aware of it in 2019, which is more than 3 years before he filed the suit in 2024.
There is the notion of equitable estoppel, that would *perhaps*, depending on the facts, apply which stops a defendant, who for instance concealed or committed certain acts of fraud, from raising the statute of limitations defense.
"If the jury determines that at any time before those dates, Musk either knew — or had or should have known — that he had a claim that he could bring, then his suit was brought too late. The consequence of being too late is swift and absolute. If the lawsuit was filed late for a particular claim, that claim is out of the case; if it was too late for all of Musk’s claims, the lawsuit is over."
That's where the question of fact (i.e., the requirement for a jury decision) came in: "What was the statute of limitations?" is a question of law, but "When should Musk have known that OpenAI was moving too much toward for-profit?" is a question of fact (and, here, determines whether the statute of limitations applies).
There are multiple reasons why statutes of limitations exist, one of them being that the further away in time, the harder it is to prove evidence. Witnesses may have died, or their memory may be more faulty.
Also criminal liability is generally handled differently. Some jurisdictions have no limit, and where the limits exist for criminal liability, limitations on serious crimes can be much longer than the civil ones.
This is not a robbery, though. Not in the "break in and steal stuff from your house multiple times" situation. Legally, each of those are separate events, and one doesn't really affect the other unless it's all the same person, and the repetition is used to get a stronger case, etc.
There are several legal principles in play here. Note that these are civil trial issues and when you're talking about "robbing", you're likely talking about a criminal issue. These are:
1. Estoppel. If a party relies on your conduct then you can lose the right to sue over it;
2. Laches. This is a defense against prejudicial conduct, typically by waiting too long to take action;
3. Waiver. Your conduct can waive your right to sue. Imagine you live with someone and they don't pay half of the rent so you cover it. At some point your continued conduct means you lose the right to sue; and
4. The statute of limitations. Some claims simply have to be brought within a certain period. How this applies can be really complex. For example, we saw this in Trump's fraud convictions in New York. His time in office, away from the jurisdiction, essentially suspended the statute of limitations.
Some crimes like murder have no statute of limitations. Others have unreasonably short statutes of limitations. For example, probably nobody can be charged in relation to sex trafficking in the Epstein saga because the statute of limitations is often 5 years with such crimes. This is unreasonable (IMHO) because often the victims are children and unable to make a criminal complaint.
It's also worth adding that not all legal systems have such wide-ranging statutes of limitation as the US does. Founding principles of those other legal systems is that the government shouldn't be arbitrarily restricted for prosecuting criminal conduct. The US system ostensibly favors "timely" prosecution.
You raise all your defenses in the trial, you only get one. If they'd wanted to put all their eggs on the statute of limitations point then they could, but you can understand why defense lawyers generally don't do that.
Agree. If this is a precondition, why force people to share their diaries and stuff? Is it all to claim they hid material things that would have led to an earlier filing?
Aside from the disagreements between these parties, what about the precedent of running a non-profit, and then transferring all IP to a for profit when it’s convenient to do so?
I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.
This case sets no precedent one way or the other on that question. The IP was transferred to the for-profit for fair value in 2019, and Musk never argued otherwise in this case.
The attorneys general of California and Delaware could challenge that 2019 IP transfer if they so wished on behalf of the public.
Transactions like that happen all the time and are not problematic if handled legally. Any of the interested parties could have sued over it, but none have.
The interested parties would be taxpayers. I think some groups are trying to look into it.
The issue is that they did R&D as a charity, donations to which are tax deductible, there may also be other benefits to being a charity during R&D but that’s a big one, then once the thing works, setup a for profit, sell ip at “fair value”, get some investment, then things are ready for business.
I read there’s no statute of limitations on a tax issue like this, so I guess it might be hanging over them indefinitely.
I’m not a big taxation and government fan, they’d probably just waste the money anyways. It does seem unfair OpenAI gets to use this loophole though, unless all companies can make their R&D investment tax deductible, and get any other benefits of this setup.
Because they got to participate in the early investment in the for profit entity.
> Early Angels (Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and others): Approximately $10 million invested, current value $1.4 billion. That corresponds to a return of around 140x.
Yeah. I wonder if the question "Did OpenAI steal a non-profit worth what is now maybe hundreds of billions of dollars?" will ever be answered. If not it will be one of the biggest heists in history.
The non-profit received shares in the for-profit as a result of the transfer. Those shares are theoretically worth hundreds of billions.
If it had been a for-profit company contributing assets to another for-profit company, the transaction would not have had any different tax consequence.
My suspicion is that winning might have been a secondary goal. When OpenAI goes to IPO, all the testimony of former executives about Altman's behavior is going to be in the public record. A lot of that testimony makes OpenAI sound very chaotic and poorly run. That could prevent large institutional investors from wanting to take the risk.
Musk texted OpenAI's Brockman about a settlement two days before trial.
So I take that to mean Musk wanted a settlement as primary goal, and that the threat to OpenAI's reputation was just an (unsuccessful) means to get what he wanted. That isn't to say it wasn't personal for Musk, just that he would have preferred to have gotten paid.
As to Musk texting "By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be" when the settlement offer was turned down, while I'd agree there were a ton of super embarrassing details that came out I don't think Musk was successful in making them more hated than even he is. I don't even think this secondary goal was successful, even though there were a ton of juicy bits.
It seems like the real sour grapes are over the fact they wouldn't let him run OpenAI. If he cared about a payday, ironically, he probably would have had more success because he would have brought this suit sooner.
It's hard to know without knowing the terms of the settlement. It could have easily been something he knew OpenAI would find to be unacceptable.
I think regardless it would be extremely hard for him to make people hate Altman et al. more than himself. Altman's flaws are more subtle and require paying attention to a pattern of behavior. Musk has beem pure cringe for 5+ years now.
>A lot of that testimony makes OpenAI sound very chaotic and poorly run. That could prevent large institutional investors from wanting to take the risk.
Judging by the sheer number of journalistic investigations into OpenAI and the number of accounts of former employees, I would have expected that OpenAI being chaotic and poorly run is common knowledge by now and the lawsuit doesn't add much more to it.
It's not a bad theory, but I think you're making the logical man's mistake of trying to ascribe a lot of intelligence and strategy to a move because on the surface it's irrational. Not every villain's move is a mysterious Xanatos gambit. Sometimes billionaire assholes just do dumb stuff because they can and/or because they're full of small-minded hatred.
Sometimes rich, powerful people do stuff that's irrational. When you see Trump attack Iran and you think "this doesn't appear to make sense," you can reason "there must have been secret intelligence proving that Iran was about to nuke Israel because otherwise it was a stupid move," or you can reason "it didn't make sense because it was a stupid move."
I think this depends on point of view. I do think much of this comes down to sour grapes that they didn't let Elon control OpenAI, and this is the wedge he chose to retaliate. Would he have sour grapes if he didn't want to win the AI race himself?
Really comes down to what you think his primary motivation is and what are just benefits.
That's fair although I didn't mean to imply that I thought it was a rational move. I think if he had won, it might have actually been worse for him (who knows what the collateral damage to the AI bubble would have been). I just think his goal was mostly to do as much harm as possible to people he clearly hates.
I wonder if Elon ever expected to win, or even cared about winning. It's been obvious for a while that OpenAI becoming for-profit historically wasn't really an issue for him, despite what he says in public these days. I imagine that for him the goal was always to damage OpenAI's reputation in order to distract them from progress or raising capital, giving xAI more time to catch up.
I don't think it's a coincidence he didn't bring this suit until after the Altman ouster debacle. Discovery was probably the real objective all along.
I don't say this in a "what a brilliant tactician he is" sense. I think AI in general caught him off guard and he was upset they didn't let him run OpenAI.
I'm sure his lawyers told him he wasn't likely to win, so have to assume embarrassment of OpenAI was the goal.
The amount of cope people have around Elon’s irrational drug addict behavior is insane. Was lying about being good at video games and getting caught also 8D chess too?
Wait but that’s the crux of his argument that he was “wronged”. Not “wronged but only once xAI started competing with OpenAI”. He can’t prove the former, if the latter is true.
If anyone is/was truly still wronged by OpenAI changing corporate structure they are still able to sue and prove damages. Yet surprisingly no one has come forward on this.
Nobody else has come forward because the number of people with a potential legal claim for asserting any such harm was a small group of between 2 and 6 people, of which Musk was one (setting aside SOL issues).
I did, but I think most people here are just reacting to everybody else's differing opinions cause most if not all have a love/hate relationship with Musk. Doubt anybody here is actually reading the story and understanding and failing to understand the new future legal implications, e.g. a critical shift in legal thinking which will force a greater focus on security practices of AI development companies aka "security audit" defense. As stated by an earlier poster, this could lead to a future plaintiff arguing that a company's failure to adequately secure its confidential information will be enough to constitute a fundamental breach of its contractual obligations, irrespective of how the info was subsequently leaked.
Right. Nobody cares whether Musk won or lost (well maybe a few do). People actually following the case wanted to know whether OpenAI would be held in any way accountable for anything. And this “resolution” does not satisfy. Before Musk got involved, what happened at OpenAI was a BigProblem for many people.
I feel like there still needs to be a penalty to OpenAI here even if that doesn't favor Musk (even though he funded the whole thing). It is still a theft.
Every AI model swallowing the entire world of digital and physical data to then be resold back to the people will forever be the biggest heist ever pulled off in our lifetime. I’m shocked how little it gets talked about, and how convenient it is that many of these companies lost or burned their paper trails
1. No if anything, the idea that works cant be built using other products without the express permission of the original author would be the greater heist.
2. This has nothing to do with the case which was just Musk trying to punish his competitor.
To be fair, is there any corporation or high net worth individual ever who, after losing a lawsuit, said “You know what, we accept the court’s decision that we were wrong and will be reflecting on how to do better in the future.”
There is, but it's a pretty high bar to clear. Merely exhausting one's appeals does not qualify as vexatious. He could keep going for years as long as his lawyers make vaguely plausible arguments each time.
No. Once the jury made its finding of fact as to when the event giving rise to the claim occurred (and to when the SOL clock would start ticking), the appeal would have to determine that the jury could not have reasonably made such a finding. It's very, very rare for an appeals court to overturn a finding of fact.
Are you a lawyer? IANAL but my understanding is it would be difficult for an appeal to succeed. Appeals courts only evaluate review matters of law, not of fact. Whether is has been more than the 3 year limit the statute of limitations places is a matter of fact I think. And the advisory jury makes this much harder to appeal. What do you think the grounds for appeal will be?
I'm not saying it will succeed, but what counts as having passed the statue of limitations and various workarounds and modifications of the time period particularly in cases like this where the acts in question weren't necessarily a single event but progressive activity is the kind of question which is the bread and butter of an appeals court.
> particularly in cases like this where the acts in question weren't necessarily a single event but progressive activity is the kind of question which is the bread and butter of an appeals court.
No, findings of disputed fact - like when Musk had reason to know of his injury, are determined by a jury (or a bench judge). Appeals courts examine whether the law was applied correctly, not what the jury's fact finding was. There may be an avenue of appeal that the jury was improperly instructed, but determining questions of fact are exactly -not- the bread and butter of an appeals court.
In this case, I think it is a jury's finding of fact re: the statute of limitations. Unless the appellate court finds that the trial court and jury is clearly erroneous, it will usually give significant deference to that finding.
It's even harder than "clearly erroneous" (the standard applied when a judge makes fact findings without a jury). Under the Seventh Amendment, if a hypothetical reasonable jury could have reached the result that the actual jury did, then that's the ball game [0], even if the trial judge or appellate-court judges would have reached a different result.
[0] Assuming that the trial judge didn't materially screw up in admitting or excluding evidence, or in instructing the jury about the law, and also assuming no proof of juror bias or improper influence.
A state of limitations case is actually one of the strongest kinds of legal defenses a defendant can have.
It's a foundational issue that goes to whether the court is even allowed to proceed with the case. A defendant could be guilty/liable/whatever of the alleged claims, and it wouldn't matter. If the statute of limitations has run, they're in the clear.
The only counter to an SOL defense is to try and claim that the SOL was paused for some reason, but those exceptions are very narrow and wouldn't apply here (and in the real world very rarely apply to civil cases).
Typically if they bring up a case like this a judge again will get pissy and dismiss it with prejudice.
You can try to file it again, but that gets to the point where the judge can throw your ass directly in jail for 30 days, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
Filing the same lawsuit a second time is different. They're talking about appealing the decision in this case. You don't get tossed in jail for that.
But (at least in the US), the appeals court does not have to accept your appeal. When you file the appeal, you have to give them enough reason for them to even listen to your appeal, instead of rejecting it from the first filing.
My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.
His case was handled as well as any lawyer could have. He signed the deal and then tried to change his mind. That's not how contracts work, and the legal system and status quo have strong interests in keeping it that way.
To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
I don't know where a vengeful future administration would come from. We only have Democrats or Republicans to choose from, and Democrats have made turning the other cheek their entire purpose and political mission. They slow-rolled the investigation of Trump so long he got elected again in the meantime. The idea that any major Democrat would go after a billionaire and not just any billionaire but the biggest billionaire of them all? Absurd thought.
By a tad. SpaceX's worth is an order of magnitude more than Twitter's debt. I doubt any serious person considering buying shares in SpaceX will spend even a moment worrying about Twitter.
They probably should. I've seen people concerned a subsidiary's GDPR fine would be calculated on the basis of the parent company's global revenue, and in Musk's case something similar has happened in Brazil where Starlink's assets were frozen and justified in part because of how Musk fails to properly delineate between his businesses.
The EU also lacks incentivizes to not harm SpaceX. The US government as a whole, and DoD in particular wants SpaceX around to deliver cheap mass to orbit.
Europe on the other hand would love any judgements which give their rockets a chance to catchup. So they won’t temper an investigation or fines accordingly.
Key word being public. People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space. I remember the circumstances that led to the creation of /r/realtesla.
> People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space.
The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show, the "legitimate" bluecheck verification program being all but dead for new applicants. People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates.
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show
I'm guessing you have not checked out modern X/Twitter if you think Musk has managed to evict the bots, trolls, propaganda firms, or even sex workers. The only difference now is they have blue checks and get pushed to the top of the feed.
Any of the struggles old Twitter had are absolutely dwarfed by its current problems. They still lose money hand over fist, the noise floor is way higher than it used to be, and a solid majority of the best users have either left or simulpost their content on other platforms like Mastadon and Bluesky. The new blue check system is close to an outright disaster, the only saving grace being that you can filter out the worst of the trolls by installing an extension that filters out blue check users.
> The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
For SpaceX this is true, but for Tesla the competition has caught up and in some cases surpassed them. The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools. Elon's big bet on Full Self Driving has yet to pay off as the deadline for getting it to actually work as advertised continues to slip and it's not clear when if ever unsupervised Full Self Driving will be available, especially on vehicles with older hardware. People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021. Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape. Tesla had 3 or 4 years where they stood head and shoulders over the competition, but those days are gone.
> I'm guessing you have not checked out modern X/Twitter if you think Musk has managed to evict the bots, trolls, propaganda firms, or even sex workers. The only difference now is they have blue checks and get pushed to the top of the feed.
Oh yes, I did. Which is why I wrote my last sentence: "What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates."
> The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools.
Yup, the problem of the competitors is that it's a whole mess. Everyone has different rates, sometimes depending on the payment method, discoverability is nuts, payment is nuts.
> People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021.
Again, that is why I wrote: "at least until that damn rust bucket". With that, Tesla started to go down the drain - it was obvious that Musk had managed to yeet everyone able / willing to say "no, that is a goddamn stupid idea" to him.
> Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape.
Meh. The Model 3 is less than 40 k€ here in Germany. Competitors in that price range of actual quality brands such as BMW still don't get that range.
> The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition
The fact that the quote of "it's all computer" is not wrong with all of the other negatives about it are automotive reasons why I'll never own one. I also choose not to do business with companies with that kind of leadership. A noble idea like by an ignoble person does not bode well for that noble idea.
> The fact that the quote of "it's all computer" is not wrong with all of the other negatives about it are automotive reasons why I'll never own one.
Well... on the other side, not recognizing where the world is moving towards is a damn large part of why the "legacy" automotive companies went down the gutter. VW nearly killed itself over Cariad and even in 2020, most automotive control units had less UI performance than a 2015 iPhone.
if the cartel known as Big Auto resists the change to EV and continues to only make ICE vehicles while their lobbyists convince congress critters to enact legislation making it illegal to import foreign EVs, then it doesn't matter what the rest of the world is doing now does it?
When you're the young upstart company playing David to Big Auto's Goliath, you need to make cars that people want and can afford. After that, having a fanatical leader that turns even the most ardent of EV fans away is also not a good for business. Since they can't make cars that people can afford and then decide to make cars that people don't want and you have a mentally unstable drug addled person in charge of the company constantly lying about the abilities of the cars, your David is just going to get slaughtered.
> I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single serious person who'd say Twitter is a better product/experience today than prior to the acquisition.
I stated that it already was in the gutters. That does not imply it's gotten out of the gutters ever since. Musk took something that was already pretty much dead and gave it a final shot.
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show
Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially. It was not perfect ... but all the issues you claim it had became massively more worst.
Musk bought it for political reasons, to stomp down on left leaning opposition and networks that were well functioning there. That part was a success, it is a nazi site now and helped Trump win elections.
> Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially. It was not perfect ... but all the issues you claim it had became massively more worst.
I did not claim that Musk improved on the issues, quite the contrary. It seems many people did not read the very last sentence. I also wrote:
> People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
Quite obviously I am referring to what was the situation back in 2022. Past tense.
> And the latest poll conducted by Gallup seems to confirm that Musk has become genuinely hated: a whopping 61 percent of 1,000 randomly selected adult American respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Musk, topping the list of most despised global figures.
> Even Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has widely been accused of genocide against Palestinians, couldn’t quite match Musk’s “strongly negative skew,” with just 52 percent of respondents saying they had an unfavorable opinion of the politician.
A lot of young people are coming of age with the worst imaginable role models to emulate, from politics to business. This is going to become obvious soon enough, I imagine.
I'm very glad I'm not responsible for raising children these days.
Ironically, I'd say that Musk is still Stark, in a lot of bad ways: both show narcissism, overconfidence, impulsivity, ego-driven decision making, control issues, disregard for consequences, and volatility.
When you are the richest man in the world, you can afford to do things out of spite. But we won't know - he got rid of the people who could have fined him.
Yeah canceling USAID programs that made the difference between life and death for millions of people around the world. Were you in a coma during DOGE in 2025 or are you being purposely selective in your memory?
Nothing hysterical about killing millions of people, hopefully there becomes a movement in the US to not only try Elon Musk at say the International Criminal Court (which we all know will lead to successful conviction, the evidence is apparent and naked enough as is) but hopefully the US government nationalizes his assets as he is a danger to the world.
Also the US should start throwing some oligarchs in prison to help rehabilitate its image after people start blaming us for causing famines and more deaths due to the recent imperial project that has become a total shit show.
A tax money laundering program? I don't even want to hear what you've been brainwashed to believe it was. You probably think California makes efficient use of its tax dollars too.
A former USAID global health official has cited internal modeling suggesting around 600,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone, roughly two‑thirds among children, due to the collapse of programs for malnutrition, HIV, TB, obstetric care, and child health.
USAID global health and development funding has been cut by on the order of 80–85%, sharply reducing support for vaccination, TB control, maternal health, and other essential services in many poorer countries.
Within CDC, DOGE‑related cuts and mass firings have removed thousands of staff, with specific centers (e.g., National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention) losing over a quarter of their workforce.
Short term: more outbreaks like the Bangladesh measles surge, interrupted treatment for chronic and infectious diseases, and increased mortality where programs were heavily donor‑funded.
Medium term: degradation of global health infrastructure and human capital (loss of trained staff, data systems, and labs), making it harder to recover even if funding later returns.
Long term: slower medical innovation, reduced global surveillance capacity, and entrenched health inequities, as countries and communities with the fewest resources bear the brunt of lost support.
Obviously Trump was not going to be a champion of clean, renewable energy. If he knew the "Trump thing" was coming -- which thanks to his position inside Twitter he probably did -- then the rational thing to do was, in fact, what he did. Suck up to Trump to try to avoid or shape the outcome.
What he didn't need to do was alienate his existing customers by acting like he enjoyed it. Did he actually think he was going to sell a lot of EVs to Trumpers?
After the many years, there have been insider voices indicating that success was despite Musk in many ways.
Musk bought his way into cutting edge tech, it succeeded despite him due to the already amazing people working in the industries.
The projects that have his actual involvement are pretty regularly seen as mistakes or flops.
I personally hold to the idea that whoever at SpaceX crafted the team used to pre-occupy Musk and keep him entertained while the rest of the company worked, is largely responsible for its success.
I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that.
It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures.
It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures.
Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself.
Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course.
Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.
> It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that.
No, it's still dumb.
No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica. If they built in Antarctica, it would still be cheaper than launching into orbit. You'd have lots of free cold air to potentially cool the computers, and you wouldn't need trained astronauts to fix things when things break. I dont' even think that building a datacenter in Antarctica is a good idea, I'm just saying it's less dumb than launching into space.
Even if you make CPUs that are able to work at a hotter temperature, you still have to contend with the fact that space is effectively one giant insulator and these CPUs cannot work at infinitely high temperatures no matter what.
Even for something like Akamai space data centers are a dumb idea. Keep in mind, this would be space, where people can't easily get to, so you'd need considerably more physical servers to be installed in order to have fault tolerance. Even if the servers weighed nothing, which they wouldn't, you'd need to power them, and in order to power that many servers you'd need solar arrays considerably larger than the ISS.
And what exactly would this buy you? Slightly lower latency for Starlink? With a potentially spotty connection, I'm not even convinced on that; I suspect any latency savings you'd have would be eaten by retries when packages drop.
Outside of a neatness factor, I just don't see exactly would be won by doing this compared to just setting up gigantic solar array in the middle of large deserts and building here on earth. You know, the planet we live on, where technicians can go and repair things in datacenters, because servers break all the fucking time, and these technicians don't have to get into a rocket to do that.
> No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica.
Solar energy is going to expensive in Antarctica.
We can imagine a situation where the server hardware becomes so cheap that the energy cost dominates. In that case, sticking the things in space could make sense, particularly if extremely low mass space PV (just a few microns thick) can be made to work and also work cheaply.
You still would have to deal with the fact that you would almost certainly need to budget at least 2x the regular amount of hardware to deal with the fact that you can’t do stuff like “replace failed power supply” or “replace failed hard drive” without launching an astronaut into space, so you would need to have an abundant amount of resiliency to overcome that. You know, fault tolerance. Something you can’t handwave away for a data center.
I am harping on this point because You can’t just say “but in future computes won’t need maintenance” because at that point you’re just engaging in speculative fiction that you have no way of knowing. I could say “in the future we’ll have cold fusion” and maybe that’s true but I have no way of knowing.
So given that you would need 2x the power that you’d need on earth. Compared to just putting a shitload of solar panels in a desert where non-astronauts can easily access it I don’t see the point.
And of course there’s the nuclear-power-plant sized elephant in the room; if power is the constraint it would still almost certainly be more economical to have a nuclear reactor than trying to get a data center in space.
If it's something that could even realistically be done, which again I don't actually concede based on what I said before, then maybe it would have slightly less regulation.
Or, and hear me out, Elon is just a drug addict who makes shit up based on his 12-year-old-boy fantasies because it sounds neat and investors just eat it up.
It's actually more dumb if you can manage all of the things to make this farce successful, because high-temperature chips that don't require cooling would work even better on Earth than in space because the temperature resistance could be combined with ambient cooling, and there are far more valuable (and longer-lasting) things that could be launched with greater launch mass efficiency.
Also...hardened electronics have been a thing for decades. It's not big because shielding is cheaper and far more effective. The only practical use is military, and there are already DoD suppliers who are generations ahead of SpaceX on the hardened chip front.
He's been smart at self-promotion and growing (certain kinds of) businesses. But when it comes to non-executive work he did himself, he did a completely mediocre internet directory, and that's about it. No-one would have heard of him if he didn't go into the business side.
Things like space datacenters are probably just part of the promotion side. It pumps up share prices for a gullible public. Where's he's been clever is in creating companies that do enough real things to convince many people that he might be able to pull off the unrealistic things as well.
The lawsuit side, genuinely asking, how does the for-profit under non-profit setup work? What are the respective roles? Is the combination effectively a non-profit still? Or is this some kind of legal loophole to make profits under a non-profit?
Lots of non-profits use structures like that, it's not uncommon. Non-profit vs. for-profit is mostly a legal and accounting distinction; many laypeople confuse "non-profit" with "charity" and they are very different.
The Mozilla Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation. The Corporation hires the engineering staff that does the bulk of the work to develop Firefox (the rest are community/volunteer contributors and partners.)
I used to work for one. Probably not that similar, as one was a PBI. But one entity paid and billed back to the other. It was interesting to see how the way the 2 entities spent money differently.
The donation was also made through a donor advised fund (DAF), which means Musk didn't legally make the donation. I'm surprised he didn't lose on not having standing.
IANAL but civil statute of limitations is based on when the prosecuting party reasonably discovered they were wronged and had legal recourse, not when the event happened. It is entirely possible to debate when that was in this case.
I don't understand why this is a Musk lawsuit and not an IRS lawsuit. How can you take donations under a charity org and then convert it to a for profit corp?
it was probably never about winning for Musk, but to leverage the legal system to air out some drama in open AI and some internal dialogue among the execs of the company for bad press.
> A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations.
Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.
I've thought about that, too, but it would require that all of the key individuals at OpenAI would have been willing to stay at OpenAI under his ownership.
That seems unlikely to me given how divisive he is. OpenAI already had one existential leadership crisis without Musk. I doubt it would have fair better under his notoriously difficult leadership. If he had wrestled control away, I would expect an exodus of employees going to new companies.
They are both snakes (IMO), but they are different kinds of snakes. I can see why to some Sam is acceptable while Elon wouldn’t be (and vice versa). It’s also convenient to be more lenient toward the snake’s shortcomings when you becoming extremely rich depends on it.
Haven't they hemorrhaged a lot of the founding talent in the years since? Now it is full of ex-Meta ad-tech people trying to find a way to make it actually turn a profit.
As I understand it, Anthropic exists in part as a quirk of how Dario Amodei's experience at OpenAI went. In the world where Musk controls OpenAI, I don't think you can assume Anthropic splinters off the same way (for overdetermined reasons! I'm not saying Musk is a better manager.)
Hmm, my understanding is that Dario split over insufficient focus on safety at OpenAI (which, admittedly, could just be the PR-friendly reason) -- something that Elon is also clearly not big on.
Safety not only seems to be an anti-priority at xAI given what we've seen come out of it, even at OpenAI Elon seemed not that concerned with safety, leading to that entertaining incident with a "golden jackass" trophy: https://xcancel.com/abc7newsbayarea/status/20546984193823543...
Almost certainly Dario would still have split from under Elon too, but also very likely that Elon would have immediately thrown a barrage of IP / NDA / trade secret / non-compete violation lawsuits to cripple Anthropic and keep it from reaching the frontier.
You speak as if Elon Musk didn't buy tons of AI chips for full self driving (Dojo) and COMPLETELY flub it.
It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.
If you look at initiatives rather than companies most of what Musk has done has been a failure. Boring Company, Hyperloop, Roadster, Semi, full self driving, robotaxis, solar roofs, Optimus, mission around the moon, men on Mars. The list goes on.
Tesla is an incredibly overvalued company rapidly losing ground to China that survives by Musk’s image of being a futurist, and by announcing fake products that never see the light of day.
SpaceX has been headed by Gwynne Shotwell since the early days and usually when Musk inserted himself it’s been a mess.
Well sure. But that's not AI chips or FSD. The subject of this whole topic.
Within this realm of AI, Musk has constantly invested and failed. Dojo, xAI, Grok. His newest idea is leveraging SpaceX money to put data centers in Space.
Your previous comment was clearly not constraining itself to the realm of AI chips / FSD. Regardless:
How do you measure Dojo, xAI, and Grok being failures?
Dojo is training models for FSD, which is in operation today. The chips in Tesla cars are also taped in-house / vertically integrated, a lot of which is presumably shared investment with the chips needed for the Dojo training side specifically.
Separating xAI from Grok (in a list like this) is kinda weird, but seems that Grok is actually a very capable LLM, even if it is not best-in-practice. Even if not beating out the top 3 labs, it certainly seems to be in the top 5 by most metrics. The xAI Colossus data centers are real AI training/inference infrastructure that were stood up in record time, and they are now selling capacity to other LLM providers. Is that a failure?
Dojo is shutdown dude. Literally doing nothing but rotting. After spending $Billions on a custom chip, Tesla is now just buying NVidia chips and wasting their Dojo efforts entirely
Team dismantled. Operations closed. Game over.
---------
A similar event is playing out with xAI. Operations are transferring over to SpaceX. Out of money, out of time. They're going to try to grab more money (possibly illegally) across Musks enterprises but there's some severe legal questions on the legality of these moves.
It's already sketchy as all hell that xAI bought Tesla's GPU fleet. Now SpaceX is buying it up under doubious circumstances.
Whatever is going on with xAI / Twitter is now clear. It's not possible for it to stand on its own two feet and needs external investors to continue to survive.
Ok, but Dojo clearly has a spiritual successor in the form of: whatever Tesla is currently using to train FSD models? Like... Tesla kills teams all the time. Sounds like many were absorbed into the rest of the org. Seems like a bit of a nothing-burger without the follow-up that Tesla is shutting down FSD ambitions in general (or similar).
Are they replacing their onboard chips with NVidia chips?
AFAICT Tesla has increased investment in their own chip ambitions. Dojo specifically being cut is a massive failure if you are motivated to believe that, but otherwise it looks more like a subset of custom chip work that didn't pay off and the company has appropriately cut their losses. The onboard "AI2/3/4/5" chips are clearly the bigger investment (they can be found on every Tesla vehicle) and do not seem to be going anywhere at the moment.
GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius?
Tesla has been a meme stock for about five years now, maybe more. Its valuation correlates with Musk's abilities as a showman and media figure, not a businessman.
> GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius?
GME did not beat the S&P500 over the past 10 years, and it is just the evidence of you needing to verify your claims before making them.
Over the past 5 years[0]: S&P500 up by 77%, GME down by 50%.
Over the past 10 years: S&P500 up by 260%, GME up by 207%.
GME performance in the past 10 years doesn't indicate that Ryan Cohen is a business genius. It indicates that he runs a company that has been underperforming the market for at least the past decade.
GME Jan 1, 2016: $7.09, $5.49 adjusted (accounting for dividend disbursements)
GME Jan 1, 2026: $20.09
266% or 365% return depending on how you count dividends. 365% for GME vs. 306% for S&P 500 over the same period (also using adjusted for dividend numbers).
For the previous 10 years, dividends reinvested, GME returned 14.59% per year, SP500 did 15.376% per year. Considering the much, much higher risk of owning a single stock, the risk adjusted return of SP500 is much higher than GME.
I'd argue that Tesla's stock price is more about con artist acumen than business acumen.
TSLA currently has a P/E of ~375. That's extremely overvalued. There's no possible objective reason for TSLA to have such an extreme ratio. Even if you think Robotaxi is going to be a massive success, it would have to completely devour Lyft, Uber, and traditional taxi services all combined to even get half way to justifying that P/E, and considering the already major distrust in Tesla's FSD, I just don't see that happening.
The math doesn't math. People buy TSLA because they want to be part of Elon's cult, not because of anything to do with Tesla as a company.
So you are personally invested in this and openly admit to it. And yet expect me to take a discussion with you seriously?
Normally the way this works, is you excuse yourself away from a debate for being too financially involved in the situation, knowing that your financial bias is too overwhelming.
But started this by pointing out Elon Musks weakness in the field of AI, and the best anyone seems to have come up so far is that Elon Musk has more money so it doesn't matter. It's not quite the flex that the Musk fanboys think it is.
The simplest solution would have been to ya know, point at an Elon Musk AI win. And Dojo, xAI, Grok are all relative failures in these respects.
I absolute abhor the man but I think this is silly. No doubt that he has had luck and help, but he is still a good businessman. He's certainly an asshole (almost certainly dark triad territory), but I think that can be a benefit when creating a business.
Annoying that it had to be Musk to take this fight, but isn't it very unfortunate that OpenAI is allowed to do this non-profit whoopsie we're now a for-profit thing?
This should clear the path to the IPO and lead to a VERY profitable payday for those holding OpenAI equity. Millionaires and billionaires will be minted ~one year from now.
I'm sure this all has to do with lawyers making as much money as possible — but if that's a potential standing or statute question, why not have a jury settle that question first, before the trial starts? Or to have a narrower process focused only on discovery and facts related to the statute?
Musk may have lost round 1, but Musk has a HUGE pile of cash, and Open AI is a borrower from everybody and their brothers. Almost all the principle people left Open AI already.
That's misunderstanding the finances involved here. OpenAI is a privately held company; sure, that means they're "borrowing" from their investors technically. But that's in exactly the same sense that a public company is actually "owned" by its shareholders. The behavioral relationship goes the other way: people own bits of the company because they want it to do well and their share to grow in size, not because they expect the debt/dividend to be repaid per se.
In point of fact most valuations place OpenAI in the hundreds of billions of dollars already and growing rapidly.
Basically, no: OpenAI's pockets are deeper than Musks's personal wealth. Especially so considering that this suit is existentially important to them where Musk needs to maintain leverage for other efforts.
You can hate Musk all you want but between him and Scam I'd pick Musk any day.
What they did to him was unfair, he put in all the money, office and initial push, he deserves a piece of the pie he created. This is quite unfair towards him.
Should have done it sooner. He took his time.
He should know timing is important: That's why he frequently skips getting approval for his construction work, dumps drilling fluids (while feigning compliance!)... or builds an illegal power plant. He usually seems to have little patience.
Yes. This has always been, and will always be, the case. It's the same in things like copyright law - you can violate any software license if the copyright holder doesn't know you're doing it, or doesn't want to sue you, or doesn't sue you in time. It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.
Well, you're allowed to violate the contract if you aren't sued quickly enough. You're allowed to violate the law if you aren't prosecuted quickly enough (for some crimes).
I don't think justice applies to any entity with a market cap above $500 billion. What do you think would happen to the jury and the judge if they did the right thing and acknowledged that OpenAI is a non-profit? Probably got threatened already. It wouldn't be safe for them. At least they're awake now. I bet this is just like crypto sector.
The correct remedy would be to return OpenAI to its former non-profit structure but that's never going to happen in the current system.
The next thing after 'too big to fail' is 'too big to litigate.'
Stealing a non-profit entity is legal if enough people dump billions of dollars in it.
Both should be fined for wasting our time with fake-troll court cases.
Basically the title of the court case was: "Is Skynet slop going to be helpful to mankind".
We all know how that story ends. Thus, fining both is warranted. When the superrich go to court, they should pay an extra fee. Like a billion per court case or so.
"At some point we’d get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn’t be on the governance board"
"generally, safety should be a first-class requirement"
"Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit"
"Because we don't have any financial obligations, we can focus on the maximal positive human impact"
"The underlying philosophy of our company [OpenAI] is to disseminate AI technology as broadly as possible as an extension of all individual human wills, ensuring, in the spirit of liberty, that the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated and evolves toward the future desired by the sum of humanity"
"The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the pay is low compared to what others will offer, but we believe the goal and the structure are right"
"do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone's comp by 100-200k per year?"
"The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it."
"it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes)"
"Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn't sound super hard."
"Powerful ideas are produced by top people. Massive clusters help, and are very worth getting, but they play a less important role."
"Deepmind is causing me extreme mental stress."
"At any given time, we will take the action that is likely to most strongly benefit the world."
"Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft's marketing bitch."
"Ok. Let's figure out the least expensive way to ensure compute power is not a constraint..."
"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved . . . In as little as four years, each overnight experiment will feasibly use so much compute capacity that there’s an actual chance of waking up to AGI"
"We think the path must be: AI research non-profit (through end of 2017), AI research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018), Government project (when: ??)"
"Satisfying this means a situation where, regardless of what happens to the three of them, it's guaranteed that power over the company is distributed after the 2-3 year initial period"
"As mentioned, my experience with boards (assuming they consist of good, smart people) is that they are rational and reasonable. There is basically never a real hardcore battle. . ."
"The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you. As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge. . ."
"Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission"
"During this negotiation, we realized that we have allowed the idea of financial return 2-3 years down the line to drive our decisions . . . this attitude is wrong"
"i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!"
". . .apparently in the last day almost everyone has been told that the for-profit structure is not happening and he [Sam] is happy about this"
"Our goal and mission are fundamentally correct"
"We also have identified a small but finite number of limitations in today's deep learning which are barriers to learning from human levels of experience. And we believe we uniquely are on trajectory to solving safety (at least in broad strokes) in the next three years."
"Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity. Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem, rather than the fig leaf you've noted in other institutions. It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies. Related to this, we need to communicate a "better red than dead" outlook — we're trying to build safe AGI, and we're not willing to destroy the world in a down-to-the-wire race to do so."
"The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before."
"This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."
"all investors are clear that they should never expect a profit"
"We saw no alternative to a structure change given the amount of capital we needed and still to preserve a way to 'give the AGI to humanity' other than the capped profit thing, which also lets the board cancel all equity if needed for safety. Fwiw I personally have no equity and never have."
Maybe if musk continues to be shown he’s a wholly immoral person and a net negative for society he’ll get so fed up he’ll take his ball and hop on his space ship and yeet himself onto the surface of mars. One can hope.
It's interesting that this was 'too late' yet the lawsuit brought against Trump (which he lost) was 30+ years ago with no witnesses, and a filed by a lunatic.
If anything, it shows just how a Jury can be tainted by politics and if you are a Republican in a Blue state with a most likely Blue jury, you have no chance at justice.
That's not what the article stated. The jury had to find that the harms occurred prior to certain dates in 2021, not that Musk had to file before then.
While none of the billionnaires on the stand came across as stellar paragons of virtue, it's hilarious that even they could not stand Elon.
That said, even though Altman is a shifty dude who's clearly playing a Game of Thrones while all others are playing Capitalism, I am extremely grateful that it's him running OpenAI and not Elon.
Seeing what Elon has done to Twitter, I shudder to think of what he'd do with ChatGPT. The level of reach and subtle influence he would have is insane. He could do with private chats what he's doing to public discourse, and it would all be invisible.
On the other hand, seeing what he's done with Grok, it's very likely OpenAI would be where xAI is and would never reach this level of adoption and influence. Which seems to be what most people at OpenAI were really worried about.
This should have been thrown away from the start, not sure why it saw a day in court. Musk himsrlf created xAi that is for profit. If he really is concerned about ai his own actions do not show that. This is just regret that he lost control of OpenAI, a trillion dollar company, and nothing more.
Can some lawyer explain the rationale of statute of limitations? Like why does a robber get to get away with the crime if they are able to evade the police for x number of years. Is it just because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything?
The easier scenario to think about where statutes of limitation really make sense is in collection of payment through the court system. Suppose you buy something on post-payment terms and then the supplier bumbles around forgetting to bill you for it. At what point should you reasonably be expected to pay the bill? In my state you get 7 years, and I think that's probably pretty generous because it covers the entire tab from when you get the thing to when you start a proceeding in court.
For a robbery that doesn't involve a weapon I think we should generally forgive and forget if it's been long enough. Nobody cared enough to bring action in court for whatever reason, and it would be awful for someone in their 40's to be jailed and brought into court for something that happened in their 20's. At that point if the government fails to prosecute that's on them, and on us for failing to hold them accountable. But 20 years is a long time and people can change over that timespan, so it probably doesn't make sense to hold a grudge for that long.
There are especially egregious crimes that have no statute of limitations like murder and sexual assault, but we might find our society better off for keeping the statute of limitations for injuries that we can recover from.
Evidence degrades, memories fade, witnesses die. Generally the worse the crime, the longer the statute of limitations. Murder in most places has no limit.
Also, if someone hasn't committed a crime in, say, 20 years, there's questionable need to lock them up for three years to deter the behavior. Goal is to optimize the overall system even if some people slip through the cracks.
The state isn't in the business of revenge. It prosecutes crimes on your behalf because private vengeance escalates and frequently lands on the wrong person.
Not a lawyer but generally it is as you say: "because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything". It's not fair to have a trial when the evidence is unreliable because of the flow of time.
Encouraging timely action is another factor. Generally people with real harms will file sooner than later, otherwise why wait?
It's also to grant peace of mind -- so people can stop worrying about potential litigation after some amount of time.
Are you asking about criminal or civil law? This was a civil case. The general reason for imposing filing time limits is that it's better for businesses and society in general to have certainty about outcomes rather than perfect justice. If a plaintiff tries to dredge up old issues from many years ago it just wastes everyone's time and clogs up the court system.
That's definitely one of the reasons; evidence gets worse over time. Memories fade, witnesses die or become unavailable, documents get lost or destroyed, and physical evidence degrades. In this case specifically which is centred around a lot of discovery of emails and text chats, you can imagine that in other 5-10 years a lot of that discovery might become impossible to get and could drastically alter the outcome of the case.
It's also generally considered unfair for someone to have an indefinite threat of being sued or prosecuted hanging over them when their ability to defend themselves gets weaker over time. Limitations discourage strategic delays or using old claims as leverage far into the future. Without limitation periods, old business transactions could be reopened forever, estates could never fully settle, people and businesses would face constant uncertainty.
Ultimately, the courts are just better at resolving current disputes than reconstructing old ones.
If they were evading the police then the statute of limitations would not apply, because the case would stay active the entire time.
It is instead relevant if the state decides not to charge you for a crime but comes back to you decades later and goes "we changed our mind, now you have a week to come up with a defense".
You, hypothetically, are a bit of a rough person in your early 20s. You do some Crimes, one of which was against me. We'll say it was enough to give you a hefty fine and a year or less of jail time.
I don't press charges.
20 years pass. You grow up. You've changed your ways. You've become a squeaky-clean individual. You've put all that behind you. You become a healthy member of society. Your career's underway, you live in your own place, you may or may not have started a family.
Hey, remember that Crime I didn't press charges about at the time? Well, surprise, motherfucka. I've been waiting for this moment to do so. To the courts you go, get your ass fined, thrown in jail, and give you a criminal record, all so it'd hurt you that much worse now that you have your roots planted in your life.
Actually, you did Crimes to several people, right? Let's get them all in on this action! We'll just kind of trickle the suits in, one-by-one. Let one resolve, give it a few months, the next guy presses charges about his. Just kind of a steady flow of skeletons in the closet that you have to either defend against (and how are you gonna do that? It's 20 years old, hope you have evidence for your side somewhere in the attic) or take the sentencing of (which will do wonders for that career of yours), just to make your life hell.
I recognize the value of the statute of limitations, but it is a technicality, and unfortunately, the central legal questions of this case were not addressed.
I am absolutely certain that if Sam was suing xAI and the case got dismissed on a technicality people would be lined up with screeds about the injustice of the situation.
I think it would depend on the facts of the case. This one seemed a bit of a non case. Quote from a law expert in the FT which I thought good:
>the spectacle of these two multibillionaires fighting about power and money has distorted and obscured what the law is meant to care about here, which is the public interest
There are questions of fact involved, and the judge empaneled the jury to resolve the factual dispute. In this case, when did the clock on SoL start ticking? Was it tolled for any amount of time to extend the date? Those are more than just counting 3 years on a calendar.
If you consider a statute of limitations to be a mere bureaucratic technicality, then you might as well say we shouldn't have the entire Anglo-American legal system.
Moreover, there is no "justice" here either way--it's just rich people suing each other.
The Dunning Kruger effect is very, very strong on HN. Also, many folks believe they are an expert in their own domain, so they must be an expert in all...you can see the Nobel disease play out in the minor leagues here.
It turns out 'stealing a charity' is strictly defined in California law as 'commercializing it with Microsoft instead of my car company.' Glad we finally got that clarified
Asking for a hundred billion in damages and having your multi-million dollar legal team defeated not on the merits of the case, but because they literally forgot to look at the calendar lol
Because no one has commented yet on the legal significance:
Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims. The jury answers only yes/no questions, so we do not know their exact thoughts, but it is likely they determined that the 2019 and 2021 Microsoft deals were too similar to the 2023 Microsoft deal that was the centerpiece of Musk’s lawsuit. Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Because the statute of limitations is a precondition, the jury was not asked to find any other facts. They may tell the press what they thought on other issues, or they may not.
The judge was prepared to immediately accept the jury’s finding, and said she agreed that the jury’s decision was supported by the evidence.
It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely. Whether Musk’s claims are barred by the statute of limitations is a quintessential question of fact, and appellate courts are extraordinarily deferential to factual findings by juries so as a practical matter it’s almost impossible to appeal this verdict.
My own thoughts:
If I had been on the jury, I would have found against Musk on every point.
His lawyers created a “3 phases of doubt” to try and sidestep the statute of limitations, but it was clearly bogus and he was on notice of OpenAI creating a for-profit in 2019.
Musk was perfectly happy to have OpenAI be a for-profit, a non-profit with an attached for-profit (the current structure), or even just absorbed into Tesla. His complaints fell flat for me given the number of emails where he said that a non-profit was likely a mistake.
This is technical, but Musk clearly never created a charitable trust, which was a precondition for his claims. His funds were donated for general use by OpenAI, not for any specific use that would allow him to claim breach of charitable trust. Also, all of his funds were spent by no later than 2020 which is before his alleged breach in 2023.
Musk unreasonably delayed bringing this case until the success of ChatGPT and starting a competing AI company, and he had unclean hands because he attempted to sabotage OpenAI repeatedly by poaching its key staff while on the board.
Musk should have just made another company and then he’d have another 500 billion but he had that mistake and now it’s over. Then again we’ll see how well open ai does over the long term
Evidence at trial showed that Musk attempted to pursue AGI at Tesla starting in 2017 before he left the board of OpenAI. He was unsuccessful in that endeavor and later restarted his efforts in xAI after the success of ChatGPT.
Musk leaves the board in 2018 I think. And something happens in DX-754 where they've pivoted to AI in SpaceX around then too. I had a lot of trouble telling what "AI" meant in late 2017 at Tesla.
---
Sept 1, 2017 DX-669: Funding paused confirmation. Elon is still on the board for a while. DX-707 specifies the board as of Sept 26, 2017, and even suggests adding Shivon, Jared, Sam Teller.
Jan 31, 2018 DX-748: Elon is still discussing things with Greg. Elon: "The only paths I can think of are a major expansion of OpenAI and a major expansion of Tesla AI. Perhaps both simultaneously"
Feb 3, 2018 DX-754: Sam Teller says Elon "just suggested we use SpaceX email for AI stuff so switching over to that"
Feb 4, 2018 DX-755: Sam Teller and Shivon Zilis discuss disabling Openai
Feb 20, 2018 DX-770: Elon officially leaves board (first document I see specifying)
This is not about money for him, this was always about control. When they wouldn't give him complete control over the project, he pulled out and probably expected OAI to fold without his support. But they survived, and he eventually realised that he had made a huge mistake by giving up all of his influence over SOTA AI research.
I sometimes wonder, what does one need a second 500 billion that the first 500 billion is not enough for?
Interestingly, during the trial he promised to donate any potential financial winnings to OpenAI's charity.
A move that surprisingly didn't get much press.
I think you are referring to a tweet on March 16th where he said "Btw, the proceeds of any legal victory in the OpenAI case will be donated to charity. I will in no way enrich myself." Not during the trial, not a donation to OpenAI's charity, and obviously not meaningful given his track record of not following through on public statements.
It was official, he amended the lawsuit to codify it, read it for yourself: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Musk-...
Thanks, couldn't find this. This is essentially a proposal to the court about how the case could be resolved though, not a promise, and he only proposed it after the judge denied his original proposal (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Musk-...), which was "give me $134 billion". I think it would have been a little more credible if he had requested this originally.
Even taking it at face value, it's just an idea for the judge to consider, not legally binding for anybody.
Putting it into a filing does not necessarily make it legally binding. I asked ChatGPT and (although it is clearly in the bag for OpenAI ;) it gave more color: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0baf4a-e408-83ea-a44b-ff68bacb64...
I genuinely don't know how to make a non-sarcastic statement about Mr. Elon Musk's promises.
I especially struggle to not make a Venn diagram of people who still take Mr. Musk's promises seriously, and current state of American politics.
I simply cannot make a sentence about Mr. Musks promises that will pass Hacker News guidelines of being serious and productive.
...And that's how I feel about Mr. Musks promises, particularly those regarding donations and charities. I think the only way that promise by Mr Musk could've been made stronger, is if it were a Twitter poll :).
You’ve written around the existence of pronouns with impressive determination.
Each buck we spend is a vote for a business (which is a bag of ideals and methods) It is surprising that people apparently desire a future where they don't even have to bother listening to those in charge as every word is completely irrelevant. I had considered they don't understand capitalism is quite open to influence but they also do it in elections.
Elon Musk promises a lot of things that never come to fruition.
Have we colonized Mars yet? Asking for a friend.
I don't understand this thinking at all.
I share all the disillusionment and cynicism about Musk, shared here by others.
But he has also done amazing things. And when someone declares they are going to create a Martian colony, something literally "out of this world", and against all odds makes unbelievable progress over many years, including increasingly re-usable rockets that return and land vertically, substantially more efficient powerful engines, and faster turn operations all around, meanwhile making orbital travel mundane, hanging a criticism of schedules on the weak hook of "yet" is myopic.
Getting to Mars, it would seem.
I agree we'd all be better off if SpaceX figured out how to send Musk to Mars ASAP.
Does anyone seriously still believe this? I thought as a society we had realized Musk is simply BSing whatever he feels like until it becomes untenable.
Oh, you mean like:
Solar Roof: https://electrek.co/2026/05/14/tesla-solar-roof-promise-vs-r...
Tesla Full Self Driving: https://electrek.co/2026/05/18/musk-unsupervised-fsd-widespr...
Hyperloop / Boring Company mass-transit vision
Mars settlement timelines
X as an everything app
I mean, most of his wealth is coming from his overhyping skill, you can also tell marketing. Or lying.
I consider him a visionary in a sense of innovation but he is insecure and immoral one.
Needles to say his investors made money on his over promises.
> Does anyone seriously still believe this?
I do. It’s not his singular focus. But he continues to personally invest himself in pushing the boundaries of human spacefaring capability. That goal seems more meaningful to him that it does to e.g. Bezos, who seems to have a rocket company to look cool.
He slashed tons of basic science funding under DOGE.
At one point he was probably sincere but he's been consumed by culture war slop.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186106
Yeah, but slashing basic science funding isn't a "yes, and", it's more of a "no, but". It goes directly against trying to get to mars.
It’s in his own biography (the older one) that spacex would pursue mars without distraction. That he went to great lengths to ensure it wouldn’t be used for military, tourism, etc.
You can’t believe musk without simultaneously believing he’s a liar. It’s in HIS fucking book.
> It’s in his own biography (the older one) that spacex would pursue mars without distraction. That he went to great lengths to ensure it wouldn’t be used for military, tourism, etc.
I said I believe he wants to go to Mars and will put in the work to make that happen. I didn't say everything he's said is true. Musk absolutely lies. But his actions speak pretty consistently to Mars being a real goal.
I know there's a risk when Musk's name comes up that everyone takes "all against" or "all for" approach - very polarising figure.
But I see a lot of that announcement, and the others someone else pointed to as his "aspirational, but ultimately never going to happen" goals - whether he believes the claims are achievable, or not, he says these things to energise people to working/paying for him to try
It costs him little to nothing to say, and other people's time, effort, and capital to try (and succeed/fail)
Tesla is falling to pieces now, and SpaceX is getting loaded up with completely unrelated projects (xAI) in order to try and make it look saleable (I guess) - it's very difficult to see the Mars announcement as anything but hype.
Tesla is falling to pieces?
https://stocks.apple.com/symbol/TSLA
> It costs him little to nothing to say,
That all depends on how much he values his credibility, I think..
But to be fair, for someone as good at self promotion as he is, I can believe that the value of the hype could be greater than the cost in credibility.
> Tesla is falling to pieces now
Did I miss something?
Year over year sales are declining. Stratospheric stock price is propped up by promise of selling humanoid robots, a technology (and market) which are unproven.
I would not invest.
That's a no, it's business as usual except they have massive cash reserves.
Having approximately $44 billion in cash on hand is not a massive cash reserve for any company with the market cap of Tesla ($1.3 trillion). Even less so when you realize how capital intensive its current car and non-existent robot business is… The entire EV market is risky right now for margin compression as Chinese EV manufacturers are really pulling ahead. It’s pretty wild to see just how far they’ve progressed while the west mostly does nothing. Even Tesla hasn’t provided any real innovation in years in regards to their core business. And from what I can tell, they’re pretty much outright ignoring their auxiliary businesses.
If Optimus fails to impress, and gain traction, I’d seriously expect Tesla to end up a subsidiary of SpaceX within the next ten years as Elon tries to protect up his net worth.
> It’s pretty wild to see just how far they’ve progressed while the west mostly does nothing.
The “west” came up with Tesla and Rivian, and their cars are on the road. And the US tariffed chinese EVs. What else can be done to combat China’s lower priced labor and possibly more lax environmental regulations?
> difficult to see the Mars announcement as anything but hype
Oh yeah, the announcement is hype. But there is actual work underneath it making real progress in science and engineering that moves us closer to Mars. Some of that, moreover, is work that has limited appeal outside a Martian context.
What a load of crap. He pushes this narrative purely for valuation purposes.
He has a legion of people propping up his stock by manipulating them into believing he is a wizard.
This is a joint project of U.S. government military planners and an ostensible private individual. If Elon disappeared, rest assured, the contracts and development would still happen.
They want mega constellations for always-on drone guidance and for "golden dome" which would allow for the laser-based shoot-down of long range exo-atmospheric missiles. You need reusable spacecraft to make that tenable. This is not about Mars, don't buy the marketing. At best for civilians, this is about making broadband widely available such that America can dominate internet connectivity going forward and increase spying further. As an example, examine a map of Starlink connectivity, you will notice that Russia and Gaza are excluded.
The Artemis missions will eventually enable the placement of communications equipment on the moon, making anti-satellite weapons less effective at disrupting critical communications.
Fortress America will be invincible forever, so so they desire. The macroeconomics are not working out for them though even though the technological edge is still working for them on that level.
> They want mega constellations for always-on drone guidance and for "golden dome" which would allow for the laser-based shoot-down of long range exo-atmospheric missiles
This is a conspiracy theory folks who just Googled In-Q-Tel have been stringing together since Covid. It's not true.
> examine a map of Starlink connectivity, you will notice that Russia and Gaza are excluded
Russia wasn't excluded until recently. That was a problem!
> The Artemis missions will eventually enable the placement of communications equipment on the moon, making anti-satellite weapons less effective at disrupting critical communications
Wat.
> This is a conspiracy theory folks who just Googled In-Q-Tel have been stringing together since Covid. It's not true.
??? It's documented that Ukraine is using Starlink extensively.
Golden dome: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/golden-dome-for-america-trump-m...
> Wat.
Communications are an exception to the lunar treaty that governs the militarization of space.
Don't forget that the original space program was designed to peacefully demonstrate a high degree of control over ICBM class rockets. They're so good and accurate, we can put a human on top of one. The government does not spend huge amounts of money on things like "art" or "science" without a motivating factor. This is the capitalist empire, not socialism.
> pushing the boundaries of human spacefaring capability
I guess polluting space with shitty satellites and causing environmental disasters with failed and questionably-permitted rocket launches is, technically, pushing on boundaries of human spacefaring capability.
> guess polluting space with shitty satellites and causing environmental disasters with failed and questionably-permitted rocket launches is, technically, pushing on boundaries of human spacefaring capability
My cat is both cute and fluffy as well as a menace.
I mean, I really dislike what Musk has become but SpaceX has brought about a huge leap in access to space. Last year they launched more than the rest of the world combined, including the rest of the US. They now own more operating satellites than the rest of the world combined. When the rest of the Western world's launchers have had problems over the last few years (Ariane, Vulcan, EU Soyuz, New Glenn, Antares) SpaceX has been able to absorb their payloads with relative ease rather than waiting many years for other arrangements. They've saved the US many $Bs in launch costs by undercutting the incumbent monopoly. Cheaply and easily reusing a rocket was thought impossible, now it's routine and every rocket maker on earth is attempting to copy them.
If you look at their filings, they are now pivoting into an "AI company". (Meaning, that's where the majority of their future value is described as coming from.) It's possible that this is a harmless investor swindle and they'll keep relentlessly innovating. But you should probably be worried.
Musk is like that person on Facebook you know that is really good at <welding / programming / performing surgeries / etc> then they post about their thoughts on some other topic and all you can respond with is “stay in your lane.”
Musk has been successful is pure engineering efforts led by engineers he hired achieving the next big-but-not-too-big step.
You ignore his thoughts on everything else.
I genuinely believe he wants to go to Mars. Desperately.
He's fundamentally a very smart socially inept largely sociopathic emotionally immature obsessively driven boy who read a lot of Heinlein as a kid. Everything about him indicates he sees himself as a saviour of humanity and the only person who has their priorities right and everybody should appreciate and adore him and it's so darn frustrating when they don't, oh wait this other party will adore me, now they don't anymore either oh HUMbug.
Do I believe any of his promises? No absolutely not. But I do think Mars is his massive obsession and that he fervently (If completely Implausibly) believes it'll work and help humanity.
Every <unit of currency> not in your pocket is in someone else’s. Greedy narcissists can’t stand that, they need to have it all. They don’t need the extra 500 billion to spend it, they need it so the number goes up. They need to be number one. At everything. Remember when Musk lied about being one of the top players for some difficult video game, then it turned out he was paying someone else to play for him? It’s just an ego thing, which I agree is baffling.
Yeah, but lets practice some empathy.
Starting point: money can't buy happiness.
So what to do to be happy? Extreme wealth removes most practical goals like buying things or going places and doing things. Not that you can't do them, but it's not a meaningful goal to work towards.
They have to create their own meaning, whatever that is.
A billionaire trying to create purpose for themselves can be boring, or weird. Which one gets media coverage?
Gates Foundation, Zukerberg's fitness craze, MacKenzie Scott's philanthropy, Bezos and Musk's [whateverness] are all just variations on a theme. And like all people, some will be better at it than others.
Note though, that they will do what it takes to stay wealthy because what would they be without that?
Greedy narcissists are lacking in empathy, that’s what makes them greedy narcissists.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be empathetic, of course. Someone else’s lack of empathy does not excuse our own. However, consider that billionaires mostly reach that status by exploiting others. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, they all fit that mould. Being empathetic does not mean being a chump. I’m not going to shed a tear for the poor exploitative billionaire who underpays and overworks people to the point they literally die on the floor of their warehouses and others around them are ordered to keep working.
If given the choice to defend the one billionaire who is fucking up the world and billions of lives in the process, or those who are being exploited by said billionaire, I think it’s obvious where one should place their empathy.
It’s not my responsibility, or yours, or anyone but themselves, that they can’t find meaning in life without being massive assholes. Use some of that money to go to therapy. Use it to enhance the lives of others around you, improve your community and you improve your own well being. It’s not that hard, we’ve known for a long time that a way to happiness is to do things for others.
Musk himself has lamented that money does not buy happiness, and after that expressed the desire to become the first trillionaire. I mean, come on…
I wasn't trying to say all billionaires deserve an outpouring of defence for their actions. Merely that their actions are as human as the rest of us, just in a different context.
And like the rest of us, there are those who cope better or worse, who are morally better or worse. Police are another bunch of people judged similarly.
Which is to say, there are indeed woeful billionaires. Possibly most of them. But don't paint the humans all with the same brush, even if the way to fix society might be to do so legally.
Because he is an addict and one of his addictions is money
Maybe he trying to collect every waifu from every gacha game. That would get expensive in a hurry.
To build more cool stuff. Would be great if he did neurolink for cancer
Because money is just a proxy for power, and the goal is not to have cash, it is to have power. Perhaps via being able to make decisions at various businesses, or being able to travel to a different planet, or being able to influence other people, etc.
Could also partly be a curiosity to see what one is capable of, or maybe wanting to be known for helming an organization that accomplishes xyz.
Why did he need a second 250 billion after the first 250 billion? Makes me think of a inverted Zeno's paradox.
Why do you need an extra dollar?
I can answer for myself: New Zealand plans to tax the shit out of anyone that has more[A].
You need a fukton more than median wealth to be able to protect yourself against your own government.
The type of person that enjoys chasing money doesn't stop.
[A] via capital gains taxes and wealth taxes. Also one needs an excessive amount more to handle progressive taxation and means testing.
I want extra money so I can pay for simple things like food and pay my mortgage and send my kid to a school, and help family members out.
Realistically I probably need $5m and I'd be set for life.
If I had $10m instead of $5m I don't see how my life would meaningfully change.
That's the difference between builders and consumers. People who are mostly consumers have a realistic number where they could stop contributing to society. Smalltime builders can imagine a lot of wealth, but at a certain point don't want to get too big. Big Dreamers are only limited by what they can imagine and make happen, and only infinite capital, labor, and time could achieve their dreams. Once you surround yourself with people dreaming of humans as multiplanetary, earthly levels of labor and wealth are obviously not going to make it happen.
Hmm... I think I could be set for life with, like, $1m.
Obviously age, family, lifestyle and current savings matter.
As long as all the basics are paid for house, car, know how to cook maybe have a small garden and no other debt you probably can.
> I can answer for myself: New Zealand plans to tax the shit out of anyone that has more[A].
New Zeeland is an outlier in that it doesn't have capital gains tax.
Its not the end of the world to have captial gains tax.
CGT is fine.
I wasn't trolling, but I have unfortunately deviated from the topic.
What isn't fine is my belief that I'm going to be rug-pulled by my government. From multiple sources I believe New Zealand will tax most savings to smithereens. The lie is that I should save for retirement; when any savings will be taken from me over time via a variety of mechanisms including taxes.
Both our Labour (leftish) and National parties will screw me.
The underlying issue is that our demographics leave little choice to the government. The majority of voters are naturally happy to take everything from everyone who has more than them. Voters are selfish.
Attacking the successful is called the tall-poppy syndrome down here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome (I'm nowhere near successful enough for much backlash - but I do fear it).
I was trying to make a argument based on marginal economics. NZ should be encouraging me to increase my income from export earnings: instead it drastically discourages me. I helped found a startup, so I deeply understand the multiple ways our government discourages us from earning export income. My marginal utility from an extra dollar is already drastically diminished because I already have enough to enjoy my life. The >40% taxation on top (incl GST) reduces my motivation to earn money for NZ to nearly zero. I am not a money chaser and I dislike investing.
After some threshold, money as a marginal value becomes meaningless because other non-monetary factors like politics dominate. It seems like nobody cares how much society profits from you - they only care about their own selfish goals.
It’s also not the end of the world to not have capital gains tax.
"Why did he need a second 250 billion after the first 250 billion"
because thats another 250 billion less for a competitor to use against you.
That is zero-sum thinking.
I'm not sure how one can learn to see the world in a more positive light...
I'd argue that if we don't abstract away resource usage behind currency, we are pretty firmly in negative-sum territory and zero-sum is a pretty rose colored glasses way of looking at things that is currently obscuring us from pending horrors.
These people aren't satisfied with themselves having more, everyone else must have less too.
Not that I am interested in changing your mind on this. I would, though, encourage you to actually say it's "positive-sum" if that's what you believe instead of hinting and then being vague about it for some reason.
Why did you turn that into a whine about a tax that exists in 31 of 38 OECD economies?
Go to Australia where you pay a stamp duty for buying (to pay for infra) and a CGT for selling
Edit: Changed stamp tax to stamp duty
Yeah, no, this is bullshit.
You can't just apply One Simple Rule like this ("more money is always better" / "more money never makes a difference"). There is, objectively, an amount of money above which another dollar, or another billion, will never make a meaningful difference in your overall lifestyle[0].
The amount isn't a single bright line, but like with so many things, there's an area below it where extra money unquestionably improves your quality of life, and an area above it where it unquestionably doesn't.
[0] unless "your lifestyle" involves manipulating major governments and controlling the way people the world over think, which I wouldn't consider a legitimate part of "lifestyle"
> Why did he need a second 250 billion after the first 250 billion?
Because billionaires are mentally unwell.
I think this is missing the main point that Musk was never the owner of OpenAI, neither was Sam, nor the employees. The owners are the American people. I presume Musk got a tax rebate from his donation, courtesy of the taxpayer; so did every other donor.
The fact is, OpenAI was a non-profit belonging to the public and it was appropriated by the donors... Who already got their tax cuts.
This is setting a precedent that if you donate a certain amount of money to a charity, you can later convert it to a for-profit and claim to be an owner of the charity... On the basis of 'donations' which you got a tax rebate from. Very convenient.
OpenAI donors should have created a new, separate, for-profit entity completely distinct from OpenAI, with a different name, poached the original employees, implemented all the logic from scratch, collected all the training data from scratch... This would have been correct. Basically what Anthropic did seems more like the correct way.
OpenAI Foundation is a corporation established in Delaware. It has received it's 501(c)3 status from the IRS which means donations are deductible to the fullest extent of the law (or some such; it's been a long time since I've had to write that). The American people do not own the foundation.
As for the OpenAI that is a public benefits corporation, I know nothing about all the ins and outs of that type of corporation.
I don't understand your reasoning here. You seem to be suggesting that non-profits are owned by the American people?
Is there some part of this that I'm missing where this was true of OpenAI at some point?
I'm using the term 'owners' loosely here, but this is a much more reasonable interpretation than the interpretation that the donors are the owners.
I don't think you understand how non-profits work. Essentially they are exactly the same as for-profits, except they can't issue dividends. Ownership works exactly the same as for-profit companies.
A cynical take is that non-profits are for-salary; they still pay their owners, just using other means.
edit: no, my bad, apparently I misunderstood how non-profits work in the USA. Thanks for the correction :)
This is not correct. jongjong is correct that a nonprofit does not have owners in the sense that a for-profit has owners. Nonprofits are dedicated to their mission, and are run by a board of directors.
You cannot have a % ownership in a nonprofit because its resources must be used exclusively to carry out its mission. You could have a % control in its decision making process.
They're correct about the equity ownership bit, but not in their argument that there's an implicit public claim of control.
The intellectual property (code, data) was transferred from the nonprofit to the for-profit for about $60M, which is what an independent firm hired to assess the value said the IP was worth in late 2018 / early 2019. The nonprofit itself was never converted to a for-profit, and indeed remains a nonprofit to this day.
The $60M in IP has grown to about a $200B stake in the OpenAI for-profit.
I'm unfamiliar with the US legal system but do they really need a jury and a trial to determine whether the claims are barred by the statute of limitations? Couldn't this be decided by a judge before trial?
Part of the Statute of Limitations isn't just on when he filed the claim, but when he found out or should have found out, by reasonable diligence that he had a claim at all.
So the question before the jury has a significant component of "Should he have found out by this time?" Which is a question of fact, and facts are typically decided by juries, in the US at least.
The two parties can agree together to let a judge decide facts like this, but generally, if one or the other party wants it to go to a jury, it does.
I'm guessing part of Musk's strategy was to have it go to the jury, which are often seen as easier to manipulate than judges, especially when a case is weak. Or perhaps his team already knew this particular judge would be inclined to rule against him, so did the next best thing.
Also, it's worth pointing out that the jury was obviously correct. Musk was lying his ass off. There is no possible way to imagine that Elon Musk, the hyper-online dude obsessed with news, AI, and AI news, would not be aware of the well-publicized events of a company he was personally massively invested in.
Elon argued that even though the events in question took place sometime between 2017 and 2020 OpenAI intentionally hid the information from him until 2022-2023 which is why he wasn't able to file the lawsuit until 2024.
That's what the jury found against - they said he was reasonably informed enough to have brought the suit earlier and thus the 3 year clock should start ticking in 2020 not 2023.
Bit late, but since I don’t see any correct answers here - no a jury is not required here. The judge chose to convene an *advisory* jury here — likely to strengthen the factual findings of the court and maybe to save the court itself some time/effort.
In the US, judges make determinations of law, but juries (in a jury trial at least) must evaluate the evidence to make findings of fact. So the jury would need to make a finding as to when the statute of limitations started ticking based on the evidence, and the judge then makes the legal determination that the statutory period has lapsed.
In the American system juries figure out questions of fact and judges figure out questions of law.
In this case I guess the question was 'when did the incident actually happen' with Elon arguing it was later then Altman.
In the US (I believe all common law systems), the jury is the trier of fact. If there is a genuine factual dispute between the two parties in a lawsuit, then that dispute is resolved by a jury (unless the parties opt-out).
Statutes of limitations are usually not tried by juries because the underlying facts that cause them to kick in are usually not in actual dispute. Instead a fight over statute of limitation is more likely to be over which statute applies or whether some other mitigating circumstance is kicking in, which are matters of law which do not go to a jury.
In this case the judge determined that it did require a trial and refused to dismiss based on statute of limitations.
If it’s a very clear fact yes a judge can make the call. In this case what Musk knew was part of that and a jury then had to make the call on what the fact was.
That's like saying can't the Judge decide who the killer was when he literally saw the video of shooting.
These days, video evidence can be called into doubt pretty easily
Or like if a piece of evidence was obtained lawfully?
I can understand why people and me included might think they can decide this before trial.
One still need to decide:
- if the video is real (not AI / edited / another event)
- if the subject the same person (twins, look alike, too bury to tell)
etc
It’s quite an odd ruling given that OpenAI completed its for profit “conversion” last fall.
It seems the biggest value loss to the nonprofit was in this conversion, not in the initial for profit subsidiary creation giving investors capped profit shares.
But this "conversion" was apparently not the focus of the suit, according to OP. Perhaps it occurred after they initiated legal proceedings?
Correct, Musk based his claims on the 2023 Microsoft deal.
The 2025 recapitalization was discussed at trial, but it was ancillary since all that changed was the existing for-profit changed from a capped-profit with weird cash flow mechanics to a traditional public benefit corp with ordinary equity.
> Musk lost today because the jury found that he waited too long to bring his claims.
I think Musk's lawyers told him he'd probably lose this suit before he filed it. I suspect he proceeded mostly out of spite and to embarrass Altman by ensuring the concerns even his friends had about his candor and trustworthiness went on the record and were splashed across the media. Musk knew he had little chance of unwinding the theft of a non-profit (and I doubt he cared much about that).
It would have been much better if Musk had actually cared enough about OAI's original mission to bring suit in 2019. However, I'm still glad Musk did this now because Altman and Brockman (with the help of MSFT and others) DID steal a non-profit, or at least subverted it's mission. And this fleeting bit of public embarrassment (funded by Musk for other spiteful reasons) is the only penalty they'll ever see.
It is possible for Musk to appeal, but success is vanishingly unlikely.
He doesn't have to win to succeed.
The richest man on the planet can keep his enemies tied up in court needlessly until the day he dies.
Or just ruin their already shaky reputations.
The guy he's suing is also a billionaire who can keep his enemies tied up in court needlessly until the day he dies, although that billionaire's net worth is only around 1% of Elon Musk's, so in a sense you're right that Musk is picking on the little guy.
For people unfamiliar, generally speaking in trial courts the jury is the finder of facts and the judge is the finder of law (yes, there are bench trials where the judge does both). As an aside, appeals courts deal in legal issues (ie statutory interpretations and constitutional issues).
So not being within the statute of limitations is typically a legal issue so what must've happened here is the jury would've been asked if the earlier OpenAI-MS deals were substantially similar to the latest deal. I can't find the verdict form or the jury instructions but I'll bet that was the key issue the jury decided.
That fact here was if Musk should have known about the potential breach of charitable trust before 2021 given it started in 2019, if not before, with Microsoft investment and he didn't sue until 2024. There is a 3 year statute of limitations.
>Musk could have brought the same lawsuit in 2019 or 2021, meaning his claims were untimely for the 3 year statute of limitations.
Why is a hypothetical ground for this decision? "You didn't complain immediately the first time you got robbed, therefore all the robbing since then is covered by a statute of limitation".
The statute of limitations exists to prevent unreasonable delay, to protect defendants from prejudice due to loss of evidence to the passage of time, and to recognize that people who are injured tend to complain immediately and not sit on their claims.
This case demonstrates why. Musk only complained after OpenAI was commercially successful with ChatGPT and after he started a competing effort. He repeatedly said “I do not know” and “I do not recall” on the stand, and argued that the passage of time made it hard for him to remember facts that would have been helpful for OpenAI.
I know why statutes of limitation exist. I was wondering why it applied here. Apparently it wasn't completely straightforward, as nine jurors were needed to reach a decision on that point, instead of a single judge or even clerk.
Whether the claim accrued before the statute of limitations expired is a question of fact, and is therefore reserved for the fact-finder which in this case was the jury.
IMHO, whether (and which) statue of limitations applies is a question of law, whether said time limit has passed is a question of fact. I'd like to read the jury instructions and verdict, but I didn't see a link to them anywhere.
I guess there could be a question of fact in a case where the statues of limitation differ for different injuries, and the factual question is which injury was it.
You are correct that which statute of limitations applies is a question of law. If facts are undisputed, that is the end of the issue. In this case, the facts were disputed, and the jury found for the defendants.
The jury instructions are public and the final jury form will be published, likely later this week.
I can tell you that the instructions told the jury to decide whether Musk could have brought his case before 2021.
It seems to me like justice should be about right vs wrong and illegal vs legal, and not “did you fill out form 27B/6 on time?” Dismissing a case on these kinds of trivial procedural grounds seems like the court just doesn’t want to do its job.
Have you ever gotten into a fender bender and not had insurance involved? After resolving that situation, do you think it would be "justice" for the person you got into the fender bender with to come after you 20 years after the fact demanding compensation for 20 years of medical bills that they swear is related to injuries sustained in that horrific crash that you negligently caused? How would you even begin to construct a defense for yourself? Even assuming you still had the car, what is the likelihood it's in the same condition it was after that collision? How likely is it that you have a perfect 20 years of maintenance and repair records for that car? How likely is it that you have any evidence about what medications or substances you were or were not taking 20 years ago? How likely is it you could find any witnesses to the wreck from 20 years ago?
At a certain point, "justice" is deciding that it is impossible to fairly and reasonably adjudicate the dispute in question, and that it is better to have let a guilty person go free than to punish an innocent person. Statutes of limitation are one part of that package of procedures we have in place to make the process as fair and equitable as possible.
The statute of limitations is not a trivial issue. Defendants have rights just as much as plaintiffs do, and our justice system does not allow plaintiffs to unreasonably delay in bringing their claims.
there are also practical concerns at play with a statute of limitations, where evidence is more likely to disappear and the trial would've devolved into a he said/she said situation.
If it was wrong in 2019, why did he wait 7 years to do something about it?
The passage of time makes it harder to have a fair trial, as shown by the number of times Elon said I don't know or I don't recall about conversations that would have been recent in 2019 but are now long (or strategically) forgotten.
Why would you try to sue something that has no chance of being alive?
Bringing claims promptly so they can be adjudicated is vital for justice. What would you think if you were sued for something that happened decades ago when the time to correct it was soon after the instigating event?
So you’d be OK if, say, a rental car sued you for putative damage to a car you rented 15 years ago?
Limiting time that an action can be brought is critical to having a fair trial.
Because civil cases are based on the preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt, plaintiffs have a much lower bar to clear for winning. However, because of the ease that they may win, there needs to be protections for defendants to ensure that it's fair. If you show up with yellowed documents claiming the defendant did something yet the defendant has, reasonably, lost the records that could disprove the claim, why should the plaintiff have the advantage? If the only thing you need to win an ancient lawsuit is to just hold onto records longer than the other guy, that's not an effective system.
It doesn't seem trivial at all. Allowing to flout procedure specially in case of very rich , powerful people with vast resources at their disposal would feel rewarding further for their cluelessness as if they are not already heavily rewarded by rigged system.
How do you imagine justice functioning in a system that lacks a statute of limitations?
I for one am happy that we have and enforce statutes of limitations. Calling it a kind of "trivial procedural grounds" is wild.
> the court just doesn’t want to do its job.
What do you think its job is.
In the US, court clerks do not decide cases. This was a jury trial, so the jury was required to do its job.
Because there has to be some point. It's unjust to allow someone to sue 30 years later, as everyone would have a sword of Damocles hanging over their head waiting for the right moment to strike. And in general, if you didn't realize you were robbed for 3 years, perhaps it's the case that you weren't actually robbed.
So if I exchange your Rolex with a fake one and then you try to sell after 3 years and you notice it’s fake, it’s fine for you?
The statute of limitations takes into account when the plaintiff discovered or with reasonable diligence should have discovered their injury.
In this case, the jury found that Musk knew or should have known of his alleged injury prior to 2021.
Statute of limitations kicks in at the moment of your awareness of the watch being fake. But, you and the plaintiff might dispute over the fact of when you learned the watch was fake. That’s exactly what this jury decision was about. Musk claimed he wasn’t aware of OpenAI’s for profit push until 2022. Altman claimed he was aware of it as far back as 2017 or 2019. The Jury looked at texts and emails and interviewed witnesses and decided that Musk was aware of it in 2019, which is more than 3 years before he filed the suit in 2024.
There is the notion of equitable estoppel, that would *perhaps*, depending on the facts, apply which stops a defendant, who for instance concealed or committed certain acts of fraud, from raising the statute of limitations defense.
Edit: to augment the sibling comment.
https://localnewsmatters.org/2026/05/16/musk-v-altman-week-3... has a good explanation of the legalities:
"If the jury determines that at any time before those dates, Musk either knew — or had or should have known — that he had a claim that he could bring, then his suit was brought too late. The consequence of being too late is swift and absolute. If the lawsuit was filed late for a particular claim, that claim is out of the case; if it was too late for all of Musk’s claims, the lawsuit is over."
That's where the question of fact (i.e., the requirement for a jury decision) came in: "What was the statute of limitations?" is a question of law, but "When should Musk have known that OpenAI was moving too much toward for-profit?" is a question of fact (and, here, determines whether the statute of limitations applies).
There are multiple reasons why statutes of limitations exist, one of them being that the further away in time, the harder it is to prove evidence. Witnesses may have died, or their memory may be more faulty.
Also criminal liability is generally handled differently. Some jurisdictions have no limit, and where the limits exist for criminal liability, limitations on serious crimes can be much longer than the civil ones.
This is not a robbery, though. Not in the "break in and steal stuff from your house multiple times" situation. Legally, each of those are separate events, and one doesn't really affect the other unless it's all the same person, and the repetition is used to get a stronger case, etc.
There are several legal principles in play here. Note that these are civil trial issues and when you're talking about "robbing", you're likely talking about a criminal issue. These are:
1. Estoppel. If a party relies on your conduct then you can lose the right to sue over it;
2. Laches. This is a defense against prejudicial conduct, typically by waiting too long to take action;
3. Waiver. Your conduct can waive your right to sue. Imagine you live with someone and they don't pay half of the rent so you cover it. At some point your continued conduct means you lose the right to sue; and
4. The statute of limitations. Some claims simply have to be brought within a certain period. How this applies can be really complex. For example, we saw this in Trump's fraud convictions in New York. His time in office, away from the jurisdiction, essentially suspended the statute of limitations.
Some crimes like murder have no statute of limitations. Others have unreasonably short statutes of limitations. For example, probably nobody can be charged in relation to sex trafficking in the Epstein saga because the statute of limitations is often 5 years with such crimes. This is unreasonable (IMHO) because often the victims are children and unable to make a criminal complaint.
It's also worth adding that not all legal systems have such wide-ranging statutes of limitation as the US does. Founding principles of those other legal systems is that the government shouldn't be arbitrarily restricted for prosecuting criminal conduct. The US system ostensibly favors "timely" prosecution.
There sure was a lot of days of testimony on Sam Altman lying, for this to come down to " statute of limitations".
Shouldn't the defense have raised the statute of limitations much earlier?
You raise all your defenses in the trial, you only get one. If they'd wanted to put all their eggs on the statute of limitations point then they could, but you can understand why defense lawyers generally don't do that.
From other comments, it came down to when Musk could reasonably be judged as aware of the injury.
Agree. If this is a precondition, why force people to share their diaries and stuff? Is it all to claim they hid material things that would have led to an earlier filing?
thanks for the snippet
If it's thrown out on a technicality then Musk got fleeced by his lawyers - good for them.
Aside from the disagreements between these parties, what about the precedent of running a non-profit, and then transferring all IP to a for profit when it’s convenient to do so?
I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.
This case sets no precedent one way or the other on that question. The IP was transferred to the for-profit for fair value in 2019, and Musk never argued otherwise in this case.
The attorneys general of California and Delaware could challenge that 2019 IP transfer if they so wished on behalf of the public.
Which they are unlikely to do because the California AG signed off on the original IP transfer agreement…
Transactions like that happen all the time and are not problematic if handled legally. Any of the interested parties could have sued over it, but none have.
The interested parties would be taxpayers. I think some groups are trying to look into it.
The issue is that they did R&D as a charity, donations to which are tax deductible, there may also be other benefits to being a charity during R&D but that’s a big one, then once the thing works, setup a for profit, sell ip at “fair value”, get some investment, then things are ready for business.
I read there’s no statute of limitations on a tax issue like this, so I guess it might be hanging over them indefinitely.
I’m not a big taxation and government fan, they’d probably just waste the money anyways. It does seem unfair OpenAI gets to use this loophole though, unless all companies can make their R&D investment tax deductible, and get any other benefits of this setup.
Because they got to participate in the early investment in the for profit entity.
> Early Angels (Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and others): Approximately $10 million invested, current value $1.4 billion. That corresponds to a return of around 140x.
https://www.trendingtopics.eu/openai-cap-table-leak/
Or more specifically: One just did sue, but lost because he waited too long.
Yeah. I wonder if the question "Did OpenAI steal a non-profit worth what is now maybe hundreds of billions of dollars?" will ever be answered. If not it will be one of the biggest heists in history.
Or a self dealing conversion.
The non-profit received shares in the for-profit as a result of the transfer. Those shares are theoretically worth hundreds of billions.
If it had been a for-profit company contributing assets to another for-profit company, the transaction would not have had any different tax consequence.
Wasn't an arms length transaction so shennanigans (or lack of) cannot be proved.
(This is just a thought IANAL)
My suspicion is that winning might have been a secondary goal. When OpenAI goes to IPO, all the testimony of former executives about Altman's behavior is going to be in the public record. A lot of that testimony makes OpenAI sound very chaotic and poorly run. That could prevent large institutional investors from wanting to take the risk.
Musk texted OpenAI's Brockman about a settlement two days before trial.
So I take that to mean Musk wanted a settlement as primary goal, and that the threat to OpenAI's reputation was just an (unsuccessful) means to get what he wanted. That isn't to say it wasn't personal for Musk, just that he would have preferred to have gotten paid.
As to Musk texting "By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be" when the settlement offer was turned down, while I'd agree there were a ton of super embarrassing details that came out I don't think Musk was successful in making them more hated than even he is. I don't even think this secondary goal was successful, even though there were a ton of juicy bits.
It seems like the real sour grapes are over the fact they wouldn't let him run OpenAI. If he cared about a payday, ironically, he probably would have had more success because he would have brought this suit sooner.
It's hard to know without knowing the terms of the settlement. It could have easily been something he knew OpenAI would find to be unacceptable.
I think regardless it would be extremely hard for him to make people hate Altman et al. more than himself. Altman's flaws are more subtle and require paying attention to a pattern of behavior. Musk has beem pure cringe for 5+ years now.
>A lot of that testimony makes OpenAI sound very chaotic and poorly run. That could prevent large institutional investors from wanting to take the risk.
Judging by the sheer number of journalistic investigations into OpenAI and the number of accounts of former employees, I would have expected that OpenAI being chaotic and poorly run is common knowledge by now and the lawsuit doesn't add much more to it.
dump it on retail, thats the plan with one less step
It's not a bad theory, but I think you're making the logical man's mistake of trying to ascribe a lot of intelligence and strategy to a move because on the surface it's irrational. Not every villain's move is a mysterious Xanatos gambit. Sometimes billionaire assholes just do dumb stuff because they can and/or because they're full of small-minded hatred.
Sometimes rich, powerful people do stuff that's irrational. When you see Trump attack Iran and you think "this doesn't appear to make sense," you can reason "there must have been secret intelligence proving that Iran was about to nuke Israel because otherwise it was a stupid move," or you can reason "it didn't make sense because it was a stupid move."
I think this depends on point of view. I do think much of this comes down to sour grapes that they didn't let Elon control OpenAI, and this is the wedge he chose to retaliate. Would he have sour grapes if he didn't want to win the AI race himself?
Really comes down to what you think his primary motivation is and what are just benefits.
That's fair although I didn't mean to imply that I thought it was a rational move. I think if he had won, it might have actually been worse for him (who knows what the collateral damage to the AI bubble would have been). I just think his goal was mostly to do as much harm as possible to people he clearly hates.
if this was the case Musk himself would be homeless and not “richest” person on earth
Im just curious what gives you an idea Musk and his cronies are actually intelligent enough to do this.
I wonder if Elon ever expected to win, or even cared about winning. It's been obvious for a while that OpenAI becoming for-profit historically wasn't really an issue for him, despite what he says in public these days. I imagine that for him the goal was always to damage OpenAI's reputation in order to distract them from progress or raising capital, giving xAI more time to catch up.
I don't think it's a coincidence he didn't bring this suit until after the Altman ouster debacle. Discovery was probably the real objective all along.
I think the same. As much as I like Elon's companies, this case seemed like a strategy, and part envy. He wants to be the first in everything
yeah, he had a secret plan to file his lawsuit late. Real n-dimensional chess here.
I don't say this in a "what a brilliant tactician he is" sense. I think AI in general caught him off guard and he was upset they didn't let him run OpenAI.
I'm sure his lawyers told him he wasn't likely to win, so have to assume embarrassment of OpenAI was the goal.
The amount of cope people have around Elon’s irrational drug addict behavior is insane. Was lying about being good at video games and getting caught also 8D chess too?
Anybody read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
Wait but that’s the crux of his argument that he was “wronged”. Not “wronged but only once xAI started competing with OpenAI”. He can’t prove the former, if the latter is true.
If anyone is/was truly still wronged by OpenAI changing corporate structure they are still able to sue and prove damages. Yet surprisingly no one has come forward on this.
Maybe one of the scientists who cashed out 8 figures will file a suit that OpenAI has wronged them by depriving them of the joy of working
Nobody else has come forward because the number of people with a potential legal claim for asserting any such harm was a small group of between 2 and 6 people, of which Musk was one (setting aside SOL issues).
Yeah people are going to make up a lot of reasons why Elon lost that have nothing to do with the actual and very simple reason.
I did, but I think most people here are just reacting to everybody else's differing opinions cause most if not all have a love/hate relationship with Musk. Doubt anybody here is actually reading the story and understanding and failing to understand the new future legal implications, e.g. a critical shift in legal thinking which will force a greater focus on security practices of AI development companies aka "security audit" defense. As stated by an earlier poster, this could lead to a future plaintiff arguing that a company's failure to adequately secure its confidential information will be enough to constitute a fundamental breach of its contractual obligations, irrespective of how the info was subsequently leaked.
Sol Roth
Right. Nobody cares whether Musk won or lost (well maybe a few do). People actually following the case wanted to know whether OpenAI would be held in any way accountable for anything. And this “resolution” does not satisfy. Before Musk got involved, what happened at OpenAI was a BigProblem for many people.
I feel like there still needs to be a penalty to OpenAI here even if that doesn't favor Musk (even though he funded the whole thing). It is still a theft.
Need standing to claim theft, need to be within statue of limitations.
It's not theft unless a jury says it is, they didn't say it is.
Every AI model swallowing the entire world of digital and physical data to then be resold back to the people will forever be the biggest heist ever pulled off in our lifetime. I’m shocked how little it gets talked about, and how convenient it is that many of these companies lost or burned their paper trails
1. No if anything, the idea that works cant be built using other products without the express permission of the original author would be the greater heist.
2. This has nothing to do with the case which was just Musk trying to punish his competitor.
The jury didn't say it isn't either. All they ruled on was that it was too late for Musk to even broach the question.
I think that your first statement is correct.
I do not think that your second was correct.
O.J. Simpson comes to mind.
My theory is this civil suit was used to expose Sam's (and Greg's) self-dealing and perjury. This was civil, now comes criminal.
Reached for comment by TechCrunch, Musk’s lead counsel Marc Toberoff said, “One word: Appeal.”
One wonders on what grounds?
In the UK, in a civil case like this, the judge I think comments on the likelihood of an appeal avenue once the verdict has been reached.
To be fair, is there any corporation or high net worth individual ever who, after losing a lawsuit, said “You know what, we accept the court’s decision that we were wrong and will be reflecting on how to do better in the future.”
Never. That never ever happens.
The lawyer himself is guaranteed another 6 months of lucrative work of they appeal...
Whereas no appeal is effectively him getting fired.
On the grounds of "I have infinite money and lawyers to drag this thing out forever, whether I'll win or not."
Nothing like 'vexatious litigation' in the US?
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vexatious-litigants
There is, but it's a pretty high bar to clear. Merely exhausting one's appeals does not qualify as vexatious. He could keep going for years as long as his lawyers make vaguely plausible arguments each time.
To any lawyers in here, is there an argument to be made for the statue of limitations not to apply here
No. Once the jury made its finding of fact as to when the event giving rise to the claim occurred (and to when the SOL clock would start ticking), the appeal would have to determine that the jury could not have reasonably made such a finding. It's very, very rare for an appeals court to overturn a finding of fact.
Out interest how does it work with new evidence then? I guess in civil less likely than criminal (new DNA technology etc.)
> One wonders on what grounds?
Invent a time machine; send a lawyer back to file a new lawsuit within the statute of limitations.
Two words: “billable hours”
He lost on the grounds of a statue of limitations defense which is exactly the kind of thing which is easily appealable.
Are you a lawyer? IANAL but my understanding is it would be difficult for an appeal to succeed. Appeals courts only evaluate review matters of law, not of fact. Whether is has been more than the 3 year limit the statute of limitations places is a matter of fact I think. And the advisory jury makes this much harder to appeal. What do you think the grounds for appeal will be?
I'm not saying it will succeed, but what counts as having passed the statue of limitations and various workarounds and modifications of the time period particularly in cases like this where the acts in question weren't necessarily a single event but progressive activity is the kind of question which is the bread and butter of an appeals court.
> particularly in cases like this where the acts in question weren't necessarily a single event but progressive activity is the kind of question which is the bread and butter of an appeals court.
No, findings of disputed fact - like when Musk had reason to know of his injury, are determined by a jury (or a bench judge). Appeals courts examine whether the law was applied correctly, not what the jury's fact finding was. There may be an avenue of appeal that the jury was improperly instructed, but determining questions of fact are exactly -not- the bread and butter of an appeals court.
In this case, I think it is a jury's finding of fact re: the statute of limitations. Unless the appellate court finds that the trial court and jury is clearly erroneous, it will usually give significant deference to that finding.
It's even harder than "clearly erroneous" (the standard applied when a judge makes fact findings without a jury). Under the Seventh Amendment, if a hypothetical reasonable jury could have reached the result that the actual jury did, then that's the ball game [0], even if the trial judge or appellate-court judges would have reached a different result.
[0] Assuming that the trial judge didn't materially screw up in admitting or excluding evidence, or in instructing the jury about the law, and also assuming no proof of juror bias or improper influence.
A state of limitations case is actually one of the strongest kinds of legal defenses a defendant can have.
It's a foundational issue that goes to whether the court is even allowed to proceed with the case. A defendant could be guilty/liable/whatever of the alleged claims, and it wouldn't matter. If the statute of limitations has run, they're in the clear.
The only counter to an SOL defense is to try and claim that the SOL was paused for some reason, but those exceptions are very narrow and wouldn't apply here (and in the real world very rarely apply to civil cases).
Pretty sure it's the opposite: appeals mostly only work when the decision is not clear cut, and the statute of limitations is.
Typically if they bring up a case like this a judge again will get pissy and dismiss it with prejudice.
You can try to file it again, but that gets to the point where the judge can throw your ass directly in jail for 30 days, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
Filing the same lawsuit a second time is different. They're talking about appealing the decision in this case. You don't get tossed in jail for that.
But (at least in the US), the appeals court does not have to accept your appeal. When you file the appeal, you have to give them enough reason for them to even listen to your appeal, instead of rejecting it from the first filing.
This was one trial where I didn’t want either side to win
Yes, pity they couldn't lose both.
And somehow I still feel worse off that Musk lost?
The strongest evidence against Musk was Musk. His own 2017 emails supporting for-profit chats made the "betrayal" narrative very hard to sell.
Muskys problem is does things in the moment as a way to increase popularity without thinking that end up bitting him.
e.g the twitter thing - forced to buy when he didn't want.
I wonder if a more "hardcore" team, by his words, would have handled this legal case better?
My understanding is that the case was flimsy enough that no "hardcore" lawyers wanted to represent him. It's not just a matter of money; their record (and, therefore, future earnings) are on the line.
A more "hardcore" team will keep telling him he can win on appeals, and bill accordingly.
His case was handled as well as any lawyer could have. He signed the deal and then tried to change his mind. That's not how contracts work, and the legal system and status quo have strong interests in keeping it that way.
To be fair, twitter ended up useful for him when he used it to buy his way into the US government and close down all the departments that were investigating his companies for breaking all sorts of laws.
As a business transaction: Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.
As means to buy an election an Presidency: highly efficient use of capital with an undeniable short and long-term ROI.
Too early to write closing arguments on this. A vengeful future administration might make us realize that the entire transaction was a huge mistake.
True. There is a “so far” on that.
I don't know where a vengeful future administration would come from. We only have Democrats or Republicans to choose from, and Democrats have made turning the other cheek their entire purpose and political mission. They slow-rolled the investigation of Trump so long he got elected again in the meantime. The idea that any major Democrat would go after a billionaire and not just any billionaire but the biggest billionaire of them all? Absurd thought.
> Twitters acquisition is among the worst deals in human history.
That he won't have to pay for. Shareholders will, as part of the SpaceX IPO.
If shareholders have to pay the debt, then the shares will be less valuable, and Musk (whose wealth is measured in shares) will be less wealthy, no?
By a tad. SpaceX's worth is an order of magnitude more than Twitter's debt. I doubt any serious person considering buying shares in SpaceX will spend even a moment worrying about Twitter.
They probably should. I've seen people concerned a subsidiary's GDPR fine would be calculated on the basis of the parent company's global revenue, and in Musk's case something similar has happened in Brazil where Starlink's assets were frozen and justified in part because of how Musk fails to properly delineate between his businesses.
The EU also lacks incentivizes to not harm SpaceX. The US government as a whole, and DoD in particular wants SpaceX around to deliver cheap mass to orbit.
Europe on the other hand would love any judgements which give their rockets a chance to catchup. So they won’t temper an investigation or fines accordingly.
Musk only owns 42% of SpaceX; he only takes 42% of the loss as if he continued to own Twitter outright.
Well Twitter has other investors, too.
But he'll also likely be shaving equity here and there along the way to hedge this bet.
On the other hand, buying twitter was the turning point for his public image. Before that, he was Tony Stark. Now he's Lex Luthor.
Key word being public. People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space. I remember the circumstances that led to the creation of /r/realtesla.
> People from the industries he operates in were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. Tech people chose to actively ignore their colleagues in automotive and space.
The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show, the "legitimate" bluecheck verification program being all but dead for new applicants. People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates.
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show
I'm guessing you have not checked out modern X/Twitter if you think Musk has managed to evict the bots, trolls, propaganda firms, or even sex workers. The only difference now is they have blue checks and get pushed to the top of the feed.
Any of the struggles old Twitter had are absolutely dwarfed by its current problems. They still lose money hand over fist, the noise floor is way higher than it used to be, and a solid majority of the best users have either left or simulpost their content on other platforms like Mastadon and Bluesky. The new blue check system is close to an outright disaster, the only saving grace being that you can filter out the worst of the trolls by installing an extension that filters out blue check users.
> The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition.
For SpaceX this is true, but for Tesla the competition has caught up and in some cases surpassed them. The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools. Elon's big bet on Full Self Driving has yet to pay off as the deadline for getting it to actually work as advertised continues to slip and it's not clear when if ever unsupervised Full Self Driving will be available, especially on vehicles with older hardware. People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021. Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape. Tesla had 3 or 4 years where they stood head and shoulders over the competition, but those days are gone.
> I'm guessing you have not checked out modern X/Twitter if you think Musk has managed to evict the bots, trolls, propaganda firms, or even sex workers. The only difference now is they have blue checks and get pushed to the top of the feed.
Oh yes, I did. Which is why I wrote my last sentence: "What even those critical of Musk didn't expect was that he'd open all the floodgates."
> The supercharger network used to be the envy of all other EV companies, but ever since Musk randomly threw a fit and fired the management a few years back the system has stagnated and modern 800V competitors are making them look like fools.
Yup, the problem of the competitors is that it's a whole mess. Everyone has different rates, sometimes depending on the payment method, discoverability is nuts, payment is nuts.
> People paid thousands of dollars for it and Tesla has yet to deliver on the promise. Remember it was supposed to be live in 2021.
Again, that is why I wrote: "at least until that damn rust bucket". With that, Tesla started to go down the drain - it was obvious that Musk had managed to yeet everyone able / willing to say "no, that is a goddamn stupid idea" to him.
> Even more prosaic things like the 200+ mile total range and integrated route planning are effectively standard features across the EV landscape.
Meh. The Model 3 is less than 40 k€ here in Germany. Competitors in that price range of actual quality brands such as BMW still don't get that range.
> there's a reason that place was up for sale.
It was "up for sale" because it was a public company. Tesla is also "up for sale" by that definition.
> The thing is... SpaceX and Tesla actually delivered something, in the case of Tesla at least until that damn rust bucket. They were (and, with the exception of the rust bucket, still are) miles ahead of the competition
The fact that the quote of "it's all computer" is not wrong with all of the other negatives about it are automotive reasons why I'll never own one. I also choose not to do business with companies with that kind of leadership. A noble idea like by an ignoble person does not bode well for that noble idea.
> The fact that the quote of "it's all computer" is not wrong with all of the other negatives about it are automotive reasons why I'll never own one.
Well... on the other side, not recognizing where the world is moving towards is a damn large part of why the "legacy" automotive companies went down the gutter. VW nearly killed itself over Cariad and even in 2020, most automotive control units had less UI performance than a 2015 iPhone.
if the cartel known as Big Auto resists the change to EV and continues to only make ICE vehicles while their lobbyists convince congress critters to enact legislation making it illegal to import foreign EVs, then it doesn't matter what the rest of the world is doing now does it?
When you're the young upstart company playing David to Big Auto's Goliath, you need to make cars that people want and can afford. After that, having a fanatical leader that turns even the most ardent of EV fans away is also not a good for business. Since they can't make cars that people can afford and then decide to make cars that people don't want and you have a mentally unstable drug addled person in charge of the company constantly lying about the abilities of the cars, your David is just going to get slaughtered.
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters
I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single serious person who'd say Twitter is a better product/experience today than prior to the acquisition.
The place continues to bleed users and is the first stop shop for Nazis
> I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single serious person who'd say Twitter is a better product/experience today than prior to the acquisition.
I stated that it already was in the gutters. That does not imply it's gotten out of the gutters ever since. Musk took something that was already pretty much dead and gave it a final shot.
> something that was already pretty much dead
You keep saying that, but prior to the acquisition Twitter had finally managed to start turning a profit.
> Back when Musk proposed buying Twitter, the site already was in the gutters, there's a reason that place was up for sale. Bugs littered everywhere, reliability issues, the disaster that was the universally hated 2019 redesign, sex spam bots, trolls and propaganda farms running the show
Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially. It was not perfect ... but all the issues you claim it had became massively more worst.
Musk bought it for political reasons, to stomp down on left leaning opposition and networks that were well functioning there. That part was a success, it is a nazi site now and helped Trump win elections.
> Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially.
It was still notoriously prone to failure, and it had been a financial disaster area until the Trump phenomenon suddenly boosted it.
> Frankly, bullshit. It worked reliably, extremely so. It had remarkably few bugs too. It was also actually doing way better financially. It was not perfect ... but all the issues you claim it had became massively more worst.
I did not claim that Musk improved on the issues, quite the contrary. It seems many people did not read the very last sentence. I also wrote:
> People actually hoped that Musk would turn the sinking ship around.
Quite obviously I am referring to what was the situation back in 2022. Past tense.
Is he though? I find he still has a STRONG positive image among younger tech people..
There is clear empirical data
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-most-hated-person-america-gal...
> And the latest poll conducted by Gallup seems to confirm that Musk has become genuinely hated: a whopping 61 percent of 1,000 randomly selected adult American respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Musk, topping the list of most despised global figures.
> Even Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has widely been accused of genocide against Palestinians, couldn’t quite match Musk’s “strongly negative skew,” with just 52 percent of respondents saying they had an unfavorable opinion of the politician.
A lot of young people are coming of age with the worst imaginable role models to emulate, from politics to business. This is going to become obvious soon enough, I imagine.
I'm very glad I'm not responsible for raising children these days.
No by then his public image would have be damaged by the cave diver incident
Nah, too much hair to be Luthor. Bezos is Luthor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umBuxoLHV6M
Ironically, I'd say that Musk is still Stark, in a lot of bad ways: both show narcissism, overconfidence, impulsivity, ego-driven decision making, control issues, disregard for consequences, and volatility.
And all he really did was gut the censorship engine.
Is that what we're calling allowing CSAM and promoting white supremacist rhetoric?
>CSAM
proof?
>white supremacist rhetoric
Not illegal so... ?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg1mzlryxeo
Xkcd 1357: "you're saying the most compelling thing you can say about your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express"
Did the total of fines the US gov't was looking to levy on Musk total up to more than the $44Billion he spent on Twitter?
$44B is peanuts for a soon to be trillionaire
Doesn't make it a good deal. Just means he can afford to make bad deals.
This is part of what people miss about poverty - it’s incredibly unforgiving.
By contrast, the more money you have the more mistakes you can afford to make
When you are the richest man in the world, you can afford to do things out of spite. But we won't know - he got rid of the people who could have fined him.
It just seems highly unlikely the USG would issue a >$44Billion dollar set of fines to anybody.
Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
And the Trump thing, which cratered his car business
Yeah but he was able to personally make the call to kill millions of people around the world, he's just going back to his roots.
Needs context otherwise you appear hysterical.
What does “hysterical” mean in this context?
"I disagree with you and have zero awareness of the world around me."
Yeah canceling USAID programs that made the difference between life and death for millions of people around the world. Were you in a coma during DOGE in 2025 or are you being purposely selective in your memory?
Nothing hysterical about killing millions of people, hopefully there becomes a movement in the US to not only try Elon Musk at say the International Criminal Court (which we all know will lead to successful conviction, the evidence is apparent and naked enough as is) but hopefully the US government nationalizes his assets as he is a danger to the world.
Also the US should start throwing some oligarchs in prison to help rehabilitate its image after people start blaming us for causing famines and more deaths due to the recent imperial project that has become a total shit show.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
"If founding is not restored by 2030, 8 to 10 million people will die."
If Harvard is too woke for you here's a youtube interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ8wm5PTKJg
If Youtube is too woke for you, here's the book detailing this as well:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243105542-into-the-wood-...
If books are woke for you, maybe just go back into your cave where concern trolling is more respected.
>"If founding is not restored by 2030, 8 to 10 million people will die."
"The polar ice caps will be gone by 2020" energy.
And yes, Harvard is too woke for me. Thanks for asking.
Not to anyone with basic grasp of what USAID did or was
A tax money laundering program? I don't even want to hear what you've been brainwashed to believe it was. You probably think California makes efficient use of its tax dollars too.
We may agree or not regarding specific policies, but hard to imagine a less curious reply.
The results of DOGE
A former USAID global health official has cited internal modeling suggesting around 600,000 excess deaths in 2025 alone, roughly two‑thirds among children, due to the collapse of programs for malnutrition, HIV, TB, obstetric care, and child health.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
USAID global health and development funding has been cut by on the order of 80–85%, sharply reducing support for vaccination, TB control, maternal health, and other essential services in many poorer countries.
Within CDC, DOGE‑related cuts and mass firings have removed thousands of staff, with specific centers (e.g., National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention) losing over a quarter of their workforce.
Short term: more outbreaks like the Bangladesh measles surge, interrupted treatment for chronic and infectious diseases, and increased mortality where programs were heavily donor‑funded.
Medium term: degradation of global health infrastructure and human capital (loss of trained staff, data systems, and labs), making it harder to recover even if funding later returns.
Long term: slower medical innovation, reduced global surveillance capacity, and entrenched health inequities, as countries and communities with the fewest resources bear the brunt of lost support.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...
I don't believe in racial essentialism myself but I know someone who does
*ducks to dodge downvotes for not only making a bad dad joke but a political one*
Obviously Trump was not going to be a champion of clean, renewable energy. If he knew the "Trump thing" was coming -- which thanks to his position inside Twitter he probably did -- then the rational thing to do was, in fact, what he did. Suck up to Trump to try to avoid or shape the outcome.
What he didn't need to do was alienate his existing customers by acting like he enjoyed it. Did he actually think he was going to sell a lot of EVs to Trumpers?
Extreme smartness has its own failure modes
After the many years, there have been insider voices indicating that success was despite Musk in many ways. Musk bought his way into cutting edge tech, it succeeded despite him due to the already amazing people working in the industries. The projects that have his actual involvement are pretty regularly seen as mistakes or flops.
I personally hold to the idea that whoever at SpaceX crafted the team used to pre-occupy Musk and keep him entertained while the rest of the company worked, is largely responsible for its success.
I heard this was a thing at Tesla, figure out how to redirect while the grown ups were actually building stuff
I'm not convinced he's all that smart. Space datacenters seems like an unbelievably stupid idea to me, and I cannot imagine anyone who is ostensibly surrounded by tech seriously considering it. Well, no one sober anyway.
It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that.
It's also a lot less dumb if you can make your chips work well at higher temperatures.
It's also a lot less dumb if you can space harden your chips better than anybody else can at the moment. This is what the Terafab thing is about (for now). Not about pumping out insane amounts of chips but about doing practical R&D for chips that work better in space: hardening and higher temperatures.
Such chips would also be useful for Starlink/Starshield and for Starship itself.
Putting something similar to Akamai/Cloudflare up there would work very well with Starlink. If the costs could be made low enough, of course.
Will it make any sense whatsoever for AI training? Not unless he manages to scale a whole lot of things drastically, and probably not even then. It might make sense for AI inference in a few years, though. Faster inference responses (via Starlink) might be worth some money.
> It's a lot less dumb if you can drastically reduce the launch costs AND drastically increase the launch mass and size. If the Starship thing works out, he will have achieved that.
No, it's still dumb.
No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica. If they built in Antarctica, it would still be cheaper than launching into orbit. You'd have lots of free cold air to potentially cool the computers, and you wouldn't need trained astronauts to fix things when things break. I dont' even think that building a datacenter in Antarctica is a good idea, I'm just saying it's less dumb than launching into space.
Even if you make CPUs that are able to work at a hotter temperature, you still have to contend with the fact that space is effectively one giant insulator and these CPUs cannot work at infinitely high temperatures no matter what.
Even for something like Akamai space data centers are a dumb idea. Keep in mind, this would be space, where people can't easily get to, so you'd need considerably more physical servers to be installed in order to have fault tolerance. Even if the servers weighed nothing, which they wouldn't, you'd need to power them, and in order to power that many servers you'd need solar arrays considerably larger than the ISS.
And what exactly would this buy you? Slightly lower latency for Starlink? With a potentially spotty connection, I'm not even convinced on that; I suspect any latency savings you'd have would be eaten by retries when packages drop.
Outside of a neatness factor, I just don't see exactly would be won by doing this compared to just setting up gigantic solar array in the middle of large deserts and building here on earth. You know, the planet we live on, where technicians can go and repair things in datacenters, because servers break all the fucking time, and these technicians don't have to get into a rocket to do that.
> No matter how cheap they manage to make SpaceX launches realistically, there's really no situation that a space datacenter makes any sense compared to putting datacenters in, for example, Antarctica.
Solar energy is going to expensive in Antarctica.
We can imagine a situation where the server hardware becomes so cheap that the energy cost dominates. In that case, sticking the things in space could make sense, particularly if extremely low mass space PV (just a few microns thick) can be made to work and also work cheaply.
You still would have to deal with the fact that you would almost certainly need to budget at least 2x the regular amount of hardware to deal with the fact that you can’t do stuff like “replace failed power supply” or “replace failed hard drive” without launching an astronaut into space, so you would need to have an abundant amount of resiliency to overcome that. You know, fault tolerance. Something you can’t handwave away for a data center.
I am harping on this point because You can’t just say “but in future computes won’t need maintenance” because at that point you’re just engaging in speculative fiction that you have no way of knowing. I could say “in the future we’ll have cold fusion” and maybe that’s true but I have no way of knowing.
So given that you would need 2x the power that you’d need on earth. Compared to just putting a shitload of solar panels in a desert where non-astronauts can easily access it I don’t see the point.
And of course there’s the nuclear-power-plant sized elephant in the room; if power is the constraint it would still almost certainly be more economical to have a nuclear reactor than trying to get a data center in space.
It gets you out of the reach of the suffocating regulatory states here on Earth.
Some of those states could project power in orbit if they wanted to. I'm not normally a hawk but I'll make an exception in this case.
Are you forgetting that you need to launch from one of those "suffocating regulatory states"?
If it's something that could even realistically be done, which again I don't actually concede based on what I said before, then maybe it would have slightly less regulation.
Or, and hear me out, Elon is just a drug addict who makes shit up based on his 12-year-old-boy fantasies because it sounds neat and investors just eat it up.
So it's a lot less dumb if 50 really difficult and borderline physically impossible things happen. On the word of a conman. Right.
It's actually more dumb if you can manage all of the things to make this farce successful, because high-temperature chips that don't require cooling would work even better on Earth than in space because the temperature resistance could be combined with ambient cooling, and there are far more valuable (and longer-lasting) things that could be launched with greater launch mass efficiency.
Also...hardened electronics have been a thing for decades. It's not big because shielding is cheaper and far more effective. The only practical use is military, and there are already DoD suppliers who are generations ahead of SpaceX on the hardened chip front.
He's been smart at self-promotion and growing (certain kinds of) businesses. But when it comes to non-executive work he did himself, he did a completely mediocre internet directory, and that's about it. No-one would have heard of him if he didn't go into the business side.
Things like space datacenters are probably just part of the promotion side. It pumps up share prices for a gullible public. Where's he's been clever is in creating companies that do enough real things to convince many people that he might be able to pull off the unrealistic things as well.
> I'm not convinced he's all that smart
We probably disagree on the meaning of "smartness"
I'm not even sure I'm willing to concede he's smart by any definition of the word.
I guess he's good at making shit up and making his investors forget his failed promises? I guess that requires some level of intelligence.
There was no decision made on this basis. It was dismissed entirely due to the elapsed statute of limitations.
He lost the lawsuit on a legal technicality about the statute of limitations not on substantive grounds.
Losing on a technicality kind of sucks ngl
It’s a finding of fact and a fundamental law not a ‘technicality’ but I can see that’s going to be the pro-elon position already.
The lawsuit side, genuinely asking, how does the for-profit under non-profit setup work? What are the respective roles? Is the combination effectively a non-profit still? Or is this some kind of legal loophole to make profits under a non-profit?
Lots of non-profits use structures like that, it's not uncommon. Non-profit vs. for-profit is mostly a legal and accounting distinction; many laypeople confuse "non-profit" with "charity" and they are very different.
The Mozilla Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation. The Corporation hires the engineering staff that does the bulk of the work to develop Firefox (the rest are community/volunteer contributors and partners.)
I used to work for one. Probably not that similar, as one was a PBI. But one entity paid and billed back to the other. It was interesting to see how the way the 2 entities spent money differently.
The donation was also made through a donor advised fund (DAF), which means Musk didn't legally make the donation. I'm surprised he didn't lose on not having standing.
I hope he appeals. Not cheering for Musk, cheering for the fight.
Cross examination is one of the vanishingly few times you can see billionaires and executives act like human beings instead of sentient PR scripts.
It would just burn more cash unless he can somehow go back in time and change the facts.
If anyone can afford burning cash for his ego it's the richest man in the world with the biggest ego in the world.
Yes, and more burnt cash (and hopefully emotional energy) would be an acceptable outcome
There is nothing that comes out of this fight. Open AI has lost to Anthropic and Google already. And Musk needs to be in prison.
There's nothing to appeal. Statute of limitations is... just that.
IANAL but civil statute of limitations is based on when the prosecuting party reasonably discovered they were wronged and had legal recourse, not when the event happened. It is entirely possible to debate when that was in this case.
For criminal cases at least, the statue of limitations is not set in stone. But probably for civil, its much more cut and dry.
Criminal law actually has very specific statutes of limitation as well, depending on the crime.
I don't understand why this is a Musk lawsuit and not an IRS lawsuit. How can you take donations under a charity org and then convert it to a for profit corp?
Who cares if the plaintiff or defendant won? The trial had great expository value regarding all the players involved.
it was probably never about winning for Musk, but to leverage the legal system to air out some drama in open AI and some internal dialogue among the execs of the company for bad press.
Sigheiling really helped his image. He should definitely try attending more jury trials. It will go great!
PS Bravo to his lawyers. Get his cash folks by promising him that he will win!
> A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations.
Intersting outcome. So it's more of a dismissal on technical grounds rather than a complete loss.
A dismissal on technical grounds, which is also a complete loss.
No, it's a complete loss. Much like in engineering, the law considers technical details to be extraordinarily important.
Not sure if I celebrate or not…
Nine jurors, unanimous, under two hours. The statute of limitations argument wasn't even close.
I think a lot about how there's a very plausible alternate history where Elon Musk controls most of the frontier of AI.
I've thought about that, too, but it would require that all of the key individuals at OpenAI would have been willing to stay at OpenAI under his ownership.
That seems unlikely to me given how divisive he is. OpenAI already had one existential leadership crisis without Musk. I doubt it would have fair better under his notoriously difficult leadership. If he had wrestled control away, I would expect an exodus of employees going to new companies.
They're willing to work under the current snake, even got him back after he was removed, so why not musk?
They are both snakes (IMO), but they are different kinds of snakes. I can see why to some Sam is acceptable while Elon wouldn’t be (and vice versa). It’s also convenient to be more lenient toward the snake’s shortcomings when you becoming extremely rich depends on it.
Haven't they hemorrhaged a lot of the founding talent in the years since? Now it is full of ex-Meta ad-tech people trying to find a way to make it actually turn a profit.
There but for the grace of god go we...
This is what he Grok hopes to become, but probably too late
Fifth place is fine, when the numbers and power in question are that large.
The following dates for the start of the statue of limitations were the most plausible:
1. 2019 capped-profit restructuring + 1B MSFT investment
2. 2023 Microsoft expansion / reported 75%-then-49% economics
3. 2024/2025 PBC restructuring
AFAIK it has not been reported as to exactly what the jury found, but IIUC the 2019 date is consistent with their findings.
That's poor for Musk, but it makes sense. He was arguing 2023. I think it is a valid argument.
But he had to know that 2019 was very much in play (and is likely the most logically consistent).
This is very squishy law.
And how much worse things would be if that had come to pass?
why would he run Anthropic?
As I understand it, Anthropic exists in part as a quirk of how Dario Amodei's experience at OpenAI went. In the world where Musk controls OpenAI, I don't think you can assume Anthropic splinters off the same way (for overdetermined reasons! I'm not saying Musk is a better manager.)
Hmm, my understanding is that Dario split over insufficient focus on safety at OpenAI (which, admittedly, could just be the PR-friendly reason) -- something that Elon is also clearly not big on.
Safety not only seems to be an anti-priority at xAI given what we've seen come out of it, even at OpenAI Elon seemed not that concerned with safety, leading to that entertaining incident with a "golden jackass" trophy: https://xcancel.com/abc7newsbayarea/status/20546984193823543...
Almost certainly Dario would still have split from under Elon too, but also very likely that Elon would have immediately thrown a barrage of IP / NDA / trade secret / non-compete violation lawsuits to cripple Anthropic and keep it from reaching the frontier.
It's not my argument here that Musk is necessarily more aligned with Amodei.
You speak as if Elon Musk didn't buy tons of AI chips for full self driving (Dojo) and COMPLETELY flub it.
It's the same as always. Musk himself is an awful business man. He relies upon buying the success of others and taking over. Outside of that, he's kind of awful. Initiatives started by Musk himself almost inevitably fail.
Tesla wasn't "successful" before he "took it over" (read: invested most of their seed capital and ran the actual day-to-day operations).
SpaceX, founded entirely by him alone, is also the most valuable space technology company on earth, so...
If you look at initiatives rather than companies most of what Musk has done has been a failure. Boring Company, Hyperloop, Roadster, Semi, full self driving, robotaxis, solar roofs, Optimus, mission around the moon, men on Mars. The list goes on.
Tesla is an incredibly overvalued company rapidly losing ground to China that survives by Musk’s image of being a futurist, and by announcing fake products that never see the light of day.
SpaceX has been headed by Gwynne Shotwell since the early days and usually when Musk inserted himself it’s been a mess.
Well sure. But that's not AI chips or FSD. The subject of this whole topic.
Within this realm of AI, Musk has constantly invested and failed. Dojo, xAI, Grok. His newest idea is leveraging SpaceX money to put data centers in Space.
Good luck with that.
Your previous comment was clearly not constraining itself to the realm of AI chips / FSD. Regardless:
How do you measure Dojo, xAI, and Grok being failures?
Dojo is training models for FSD, which is in operation today. The chips in Tesla cars are also taped in-house / vertically integrated, a lot of which is presumably shared investment with the chips needed for the Dojo training side specifically.
Separating xAI from Grok (in a list like this) is kinda weird, but seems that Grok is actually a very capable LLM, even if it is not best-in-practice. Even if not beating out the top 3 labs, it certainly seems to be in the top 5 by most metrics. The xAI Colossus data centers are real AI training/inference infrastructure that were stood up in record time, and they are now selling capacity to other LLM providers. Is that a failure?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-shuts-down-dojo-ai-2219...
Dojo is shutdown dude. Literally doing nothing but rotting. After spending $Billions on a custom chip, Tesla is now just buying NVidia chips and wasting their Dojo efforts entirely
Team dismantled. Operations closed. Game over.
---------
A similar event is playing out with xAI. Operations are transferring over to SpaceX. Out of money, out of time. They're going to try to grab more money (possibly illegally) across Musks enterprises but there's some severe legal questions on the legality of these moves.
It's already sketchy as all hell that xAI bought Tesla's GPU fleet. Now SpaceX is buying it up under doubious circumstances.
Whatever is going on with xAI / Twitter is now clear. It's not possible for it to stand on its own two feet and needs external investors to continue to survive.
Ok, but Dojo clearly has a spiritual successor in the form of: whatever Tesla is currently using to train FSD models? Like... Tesla kills teams all the time. Sounds like many were absorbed into the rest of the org. Seems like a bit of a nothing-burger without the follow-up that Tesla is shutting down FSD ambitions in general (or similar).
Yeah. It's called NVidia GPUs.
IE: Tesla spent over a $Billion building a team and custom building Dojo chips only to fire the entire team, throw away their chips and buy NVidia.
Are they replacing their onboard chips with NVidia chips?
AFAICT Tesla has increased investment in their own chip ambitions. Dojo specifically being cut is a massive failure if you are motivated to believe that, but otherwise it looks more like a subset of custom chip work that didn't pay off and the company has appropriately cut their losses. The onboard "AI2/3/4/5" chips are clearly the bigger investment (they can be found on every Tesla vehicle) and do not seem to be going anywhere at the moment.
We are just a few months away from the 10 year anniversary of Elon's coast-to-coast full self driving promise made in 2016.
If your idea of Elon Musks AI success is to lean on THAT side of Tesla... well, good luck with that.
Tesla is one of 3 companies currently operating a driverless taxi service.
10 years returns S&P 500 (index of all those better than Musk): 261% Tesla: 2700%
Disclaimer: My portfolio is 65% Tesla.
GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius?
Tesla has been a meme stock for about five years now, maybe more. Its valuation correlates with Musk's abilities as a showman and media figure, not a businessman.
> GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius?
GME did not beat the S&P500 over the past 10 years, and it is just the evidence of you needing to verify your claims before making them.
Over the past 5 years[0]: S&P500 up by 77%, GME down by 50%.
Over the past 10 years: S&P500 up by 260%, GME up by 207%.
GME performance in the past 10 years doesn't indicate that Ryan Cohen is a business genius. It indicates that he runs a company that has been underperforming the market for at least the past decade.
0. https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/.INX:INDEXSP?windo...
I did look up numbers before I made that claim:
From Yahoo Finance
GME Jan 1, 2016: $7.09, $5.49 adjusted (accounting for dividend disbursements)
GME Jan 1, 2026: $20.09
266% or 365% return depending on how you count dividends. 365% for GME vs. 306% for S&P 500 over the same period (also using adjusted for dividend numbers).
For the previous 10 years, dividends reinvested, GME returned 14.59% per year, SP500 did 15.376% per year. Considering the much, much higher risk of owning a single stock, the risk adjusted return of SP500 is much higher than GME.
https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/
https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
I was responding to the idea Musk is not a good businessman. I think the evidence suggests otherwise.
Market Cap: Tesla (TSLA): ~$1.4T GameStop (GME): ~$9.7B
If anything, GME is a meme.
I also gave my bias so as a way to ignore me.
I'd argue that Tesla's stock price is more about con artist acumen than business acumen.
TSLA currently has a P/E of ~375. That's extremely overvalued. There's no possible objective reason for TSLA to have such an extreme ratio. Even if you think Robotaxi is going to be a massive success, it would have to completely devour Lyft, Uber, and traditional taxi services all combined to even get half way to justifying that P/E, and considering the already major distrust in Tesla's FSD, I just don't see that happening.
The math doesn't math. People buy TSLA because they want to be part of Elon's cult, not because of anything to do with Tesla as a company.
I remember the days when a P/E in the high single digits was a giant red flag.
So you are personally invested in this and openly admit to it. And yet expect me to take a discussion with you seriously?
Normally the way this works, is you excuse yourself away from a debate for being too financially involved in the situation, knowing that your financial bias is too overwhelming.
I do not expect you to take me seriously.
Nor I you.
But started this by pointing out Elon Musks weakness in the field of AI, and the best anyone seems to have come up so far is that Elon Musk has more money so it doesn't matter. It's not quite the flex that the Musk fanboys think it is.
The simplest solution would have been to ya know, point at an Elon Musk AI win. And Dojo, xAI, Grok are all relative failures in these respects.
I absolute abhor the man but I think this is silly. No doubt that he has had luck and help, but he is still a good businessman. He's certainly an asshole (almost certainly dark triad territory), but I think that can be a benefit when creating a business.
It isn't helping him in this fight vs Sam Altman, AI investments or the like.
Annoying that it had to be Musk to take this fight, but isn't it very unfortunate that OpenAI is allowed to do this non-profit whoopsie we're now a for-profit thing?
Laws were broken?
This should clear the path to the IPO and lead to a VERY profitable payday for those holding OpenAI equity. Millionaires and billionaires will be minted ~one year from now.
I'm sure this all has to do with lawyers making as much money as possible — but if that's a potential standing or statute question, why not have a jury settle that question first, before the trial starts? Or to have a narrower process focused only on discovery and facts related to the statute?
Musk may have lost round 1, but Musk has a HUGE pile of cash, and Open AI is a borrower from everybody and their brothers. Almost all the principle people left Open AI already.
Musk doesn’t seem particularly good at lawsuits. Remember when he was suing Twitter to get out of having to buy them?
Perhaps he lacks good lawyers, perhaps he just can’t find substance and he’s filling out of spite.
Remember Delaware? Where he not only won on appeal but provoked an exodus of companies out of Delaware?
That's misunderstanding the finances involved here. OpenAI is a privately held company; sure, that means they're "borrowing" from their investors technically. But that's in exactly the same sense that a public company is actually "owned" by its shareholders. The behavioral relationship goes the other way: people own bits of the company because they want it to do well and their share to grow in size, not because they expect the debt/dividend to be repaid per se.
In point of fact most valuations place OpenAI in the hundreds of billions of dollars already and growing rapidly.
Basically, no: OpenAI's pockets are deeper than Musks's personal wealth. Especially so considering that this suit is existentially important to them where Musk needs to maintain leverage for other efforts.
There won't be a round 2. It's over.
You can hate Musk all you want but between him and Scam I'd pick Musk any day.
What they did to him was unfair, he put in all the money, office and initial push, he deserves a piece of the pie he created. This is quite unfair towards him.
Should have done it sooner. He took his time. He should know timing is important: That's why he frequently skips getting approval for his construction work, dumps drilling fluids (while feigning compliance!)... or builds an illegal power plant. He usually seems to have little patience.
We're all supposed to play by the same rules.
He isn't asking for money tho? He is suing because he believes he was promised that it would be a not for profit forever.
But they have emails from one Elon Musk telling them to structure it roughly how it turned out.
They also have emails including Musk where the profit share is discussed, and his "investment" is talked about as roughly a donation.
Like he could have asked for a profit share at any point and it just doesn't seem to happen?
If the outcome is unfair to Musk, its because Musk worked tirelessly to ensure he had no legal standing with which to make it fair to Musk.
So you are allowed to violate the law if you aren't sued quickly enough.
Yes. This has always been, and will always be, the case. It's the same in things like copyright law - you can violate any software license if the copyright holder doesn't know you're doing it, or doesn't want to sue you, or doesn't sue you in time. It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.
What Altman and Brockman did still seems highly unethical.
The tech industry largely does not care about ethics.
You misspelled “finance”.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone.
> It's the same with taxi medallions or hotel regulations if you're trying to start Uber or AirBNB.
They didn’t do any lobbying? ^_^
Well, you're allowed to violate the contract if you aren't sued quickly enough. You're allowed to violate the law if you aren't prosecuted quickly enough (for some crimes).
I don't think justice applies to any entity with a market cap above $500 billion. What do you think would happen to the jury and the judge if they did the right thing and acknowledged that OpenAI is a non-profit? Probably got threatened already. It wouldn't be safe for them. At least they're awake now. I bet this is just like crypto sector.
The correct remedy would be to return OpenAI to its former non-profit structure but that's never going to happen in the current system.
The next thing after 'too big to fail' is 'too big to litigate.'
Stealing a non-profit entity is legal if enough people dump billions of dollars in it.
Anyone getting emotional in this thread arguing on behalf of either billionaire should have a long hard look in the mirror.
It isn’t fun when billionaires fight — an asshole always ends up winning.
Both should be fined for wasting our time with fake-troll court cases.
Basically the title of the court case was: "Is Skynet slop going to be helpful to mankind".
We all know how that story ends. Thus, fining both is warranted. When the superrich go to court, they should pay an extra fee. Like a billion per court case or so.
Interesting quotes from the discovery emails. - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5jjk4CDnj9tA7ugxr/openai-ema...
"At some point we’d get someone to run the team, but he/she probably shouldn’t be on the governance board"
"generally, safety should be a first-class requirement"
"Probably better to have a standard C corp with a parallel nonprofit"
"Because we don't have any financial obligations, we can focus on the maximal positive human impact"
"The underlying philosophy of our company [OpenAI] is to disseminate AI technology as broadly as possible as an extension of all individual human wills, ensuring, in the spirit of liberty, that the power of digital intelligence is not overly concentrated and evolves toward the future desired by the sum of humanity"
"The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the pay is low compared to what others will offer, but we believe the goal and the structure are right"
"do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone's comp by 100-200k per year?"
"The output of any company is the vector sum of the people within it."
"it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes)"
"Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn't sound super hard."
"Powerful ideas are produced by top people. Massive clusters help, and are very worth getting, but they play a less important role."
"Deepmind is causing me extreme mental stress."
"At any given time, we will take the action that is likely to most strongly benefit the world."
"Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft's marketing bitch."
"Ok. Let's figure out the least expensive way to ensure compute power is not a constraint..."
"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved . . . In as little as four years, each overnight experiment will feasibly use so much compute capacity that there’s an actual chance of waking up to AGI"
"We think the path must be: AI research non-profit (through end of 2017), AI research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018), Government project (when: ??)"
"Satisfying this means a situation where, regardless of what happens to the three of them, it's guaranteed that power over the company is distributed after the 2-3 year initial period"
"As mentioned, my experience with boards (assuming they consist of good, smart people) is that they are rational and reasonable. There is basically never a real hardcore battle. . ."
"The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you. As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge. . ."
"Specifically, the concern is that Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI's mission"
"During this negotiation, we realized that we have allowed the idea of financial return 2-3 years down the line to drive our decisions . . . this attitude is wrong"
"i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!"
". . .apparently in the last day almost everyone has been told that the for-profit structure is not happening and he [Sam] is happy about this"
"Our goal and mission are fundamentally correct"
"We also have identified a small but finite number of limitations in today's deep learning which are barriers to learning from human levels of experience. And we believe we uniquely are on trajectory to solving safety (at least in broad strokes) in the next three years."
"Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity. Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem, rather than the fig leaf you've noted in other institutions. It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies. Related to this, we need to communicate a "better red than dead" outlook — we're trying to build safe AGI, and we're not willing to destroy the world in a down-to-the-wire race to do so."
"The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they’d thought before."
"This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."
"all investors are clear that they should never expect a profit"
"We saw no alternative to a structure change given the amount of capital we needed and still to preserve a way to 'give the AGI to humanity' other than the capped profit thing, which also lets the board cancel all equity if needed for safety. Fwiw I personally have no equity and never have."
Maybe if musk continues to be shown he’s a wholly immoral person and a net negative for society he’ll get so fed up he’ll take his ball and hop on his space ship and yeet himself onto the surface of mars. One can hope.
It's interesting that this was 'too late' yet the lawsuit brought against Trump (which he lost) was 30+ years ago with no witnesses, and a filed by a lunatic.
If anything, it shows just how a Jury can be tainted by politics and if you are a Republican in a Blue state with a most likely Blue jury, you have no chance at justice.
Sam is just too good at this game and as I said before [0] is far worse than Elon and also outsmarted him.
Of course this will be appealed but, as you see the claims just don't stick.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651664
Why do you think Sam is worse than Elon?
Presumably better at being devious. Elon is sloppy...
There's something to be said for the fact that the current crop of plutocrats just show their whole asses.
I’m not a Sam Altman fan, but I think it’s debatable if he’s worse than the guy who did a sieg heil at a political rally
Be more afraid of the technocrat who doesn't even have a tell. It means they are better at manipulation.
Does this also mean we should be more afraid of (leadership) Democrats than Republicans?
Advice for Elon: you can actually use ChatGPT on the web or the desktop app to schedule reminders for you, like "file lawsuit against OpenAI."
The consequences of relying on grok..
Did you not read the article at all? He had to do this in 2021, well before such GPT apps existed.
That's not what the article stated. The jury had to find that the harms occurred prior to certain dates in 2021, not that Musk had to file before then.
Interesting how it played out. Curious will it somehow affect OpenAI business or XAi.
He lost his trial. That is just the first phase of a lawsuit.
No, it's effectively over.
It really doesn't matter. OpenAI will surely fail under Sam Altman. Just like Sam's other ventures.
While none of the billionnaires on the stand came across as stellar paragons of virtue, it's hilarious that even they could not stand Elon.
That said, even though Altman is a shifty dude who's clearly playing a Game of Thrones while all others are playing Capitalism, I am extremely grateful that it's him running OpenAI and not Elon.
Seeing what Elon has done to Twitter, I shudder to think of what he'd do with ChatGPT. The level of reach and subtle influence he would have is insane. He could do with private chats what he's doing to public discourse, and it would all be invisible.
On the other hand, seeing what he's done with Grok, it's very likely OpenAI would be where xAI is and would never reach this level of adoption and influence. Which seems to be what most people at OpenAI were really worried about.
This should have been thrown away from the start, not sure why it saw a day in court. Musk himsrlf created xAi that is for profit. If he really is concerned about ai his own actions do not show that. This is just regret that he lost control of OpenAI, a trillion dollar company, and nothing more.
Ending a trial over a bureaucratic technicality is not good justice.
Statute of limitations is not a "bureaucratic technicality", it is the law.
Can some lawyer explain the rationale of statute of limitations? Like why does a robber get to get away with the crime if they are able to evade the police for x number of years. Is it just because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything?
The easier scenario to think about where statutes of limitation really make sense is in collection of payment through the court system. Suppose you buy something on post-payment terms and then the supplier bumbles around forgetting to bill you for it. At what point should you reasonably be expected to pay the bill? In my state you get 7 years, and I think that's probably pretty generous because it covers the entire tab from when you get the thing to when you start a proceeding in court.
For a robbery that doesn't involve a weapon I think we should generally forgive and forget if it's been long enough. Nobody cared enough to bring action in court for whatever reason, and it would be awful for someone in their 40's to be jailed and brought into court for something that happened in their 20's. At that point if the government fails to prosecute that's on them, and on us for failing to hold them accountable. But 20 years is a long time and people can change over that timespan, so it probably doesn't make sense to hold a grudge for that long.
There are especially egregious crimes that have no statute of limitations like murder and sexual assault, but we might find our society better off for keeping the statute of limitations for injuries that we can recover from.
Evidence degrades, memories fade, witnesses die. Generally the worse the crime, the longer the statute of limitations. Murder in most places has no limit.
Also, if someone hasn't committed a crime in, say, 20 years, there's questionable need to lock them up for three years to deter the behavior. Goal is to optimize the overall system even if some people slip through the cracks.
>Evidence degrades
Maybe in the past, but with modern technology that isn't always true. Statue of limitations comes from a time before even cameras existed.
The purpose of the law isn't revenge.
Also, I see many other people in this thread confusing criminal law and civil law, which is a bit sad to see on a place like HN.
It absolutely is, if you arent going to punish someone who hurt my child then I will do it myself.
The state isn't in the business of revenge. It prosecutes crimes on your behalf because private vengeance escalates and frequently lands on the wrong person.
Not a lawyer but generally it is as you say: "because the trials suck after a while cuz no one remembers anything". It's not fair to have a trial when the evidence is unreliable because of the flow of time.
Encouraging timely action is another factor. Generally people with real harms will file sooner than later, otherwise why wait?
It's also to grant peace of mind -- so people can stop worrying about potential litigation after some amount of time.
Are you asking about criminal or civil law? This was a civil case. The general reason for imposing filing time limits is that it's better for businesses and society in general to have certainty about outcomes rather than perfect justice. If a plaintiff tries to dredge up old issues from many years ago it just wastes everyone's time and clogs up the court system.
+1
Wasting everyone's time and clogging up the court system perfectly describes the heart of this matter. Plain bullying and hype.
That's definitely one of the reasons; evidence gets worse over time. Memories fade, witnesses die or become unavailable, documents get lost or destroyed, and physical evidence degrades. In this case specifically which is centred around a lot of discovery of emails and text chats, you can imagine that in other 5-10 years a lot of that discovery might become impossible to get and could drastically alter the outcome of the case.
It's also generally considered unfair for someone to have an indefinite threat of being sued or prosecuted hanging over them when their ability to defend themselves gets weaker over time. Limitations discourage strategic delays or using old claims as leverage far into the future. Without limitation periods, old business transactions could be reopened forever, estates could never fully settle, people and businesses would face constant uncertainty.
Ultimately, the courts are just better at resolving current disputes than reconstructing old ones.
If they were evading the police then the statute of limitations would not apply, because the case would stay active the entire time.
It is instead relevant if the state decides not to charge you for a crime but comes back to you decades later and goes "we changed our mind, now you have a week to come up with a defense".
You, hypothetically, are a bit of a rough person in your early 20s. You do some Crimes, one of which was against me. We'll say it was enough to give you a hefty fine and a year or less of jail time.
I don't press charges.
20 years pass. You grow up. You've changed your ways. You've become a squeaky-clean individual. You've put all that behind you. You become a healthy member of society. Your career's underway, you live in your own place, you may or may not have started a family.
Hey, remember that Crime I didn't press charges about at the time? Well, surprise, motherfucka. I've been waiting for this moment to do so. To the courts you go, get your ass fined, thrown in jail, and give you a criminal record, all so it'd hurt you that much worse now that you have your roots planted in your life.
Actually, you did Crimes to several people, right? Let's get them all in on this action! We'll just kind of trickle the suits in, one-by-one. Let one resolve, give it a few months, the next guy presses charges about his. Just kind of a steady flow of skeletons in the closet that you have to either defend against (and how are you gonna do that? It's 20 years old, hope you have evidence for your side somewhere in the attic) or take the sentencing of (which will do wonders for that career of yours), just to make your life hell.
Not a lawyer, but - fugitives don't get to run the clock on statute of limitations.
To a large extent.
I recognize the value of the statute of limitations, but it is a technicality, and unfortunately, the central legal questions of this case were not addressed.
I am absolutely certain that if Sam was suing xAI and the case got dismissed on a technicality people would be lined up with screeds about the injustice of the situation.
I think it would depend on the facts of the case. This one seemed a bit of a non case. Quote from a law expert in the FT which I thought good:
>the spectacle of these two multibillionaires fighting about power and money has distorted and obscured what the law is meant to care about here, which is the public interest
(https://www.ft.com/content/846479c8-4ab0-4812-a1d5-08abdd8b9...)
That's just a point about how (annoying) Sam-boosters are.
It can be both
Then why did the American justice system needed nine jurors when a clerk could have sufficed?
The American judicial system is completely Byzantine and rotten, from top to bottom. Worse than many third world countries.
There are questions of fact involved, and the judge empaneled the jury to resolve the factual dispute. In this case, when did the clock on SoL start ticking? Was it tolled for any amount of time to extend the date? Those are more than just counting 3 years on a calendar.
If you consider a statute of limitations to be a mere bureaucratic technicality, then you might as well say we shouldn't have the entire Anglo-American legal system.
Moreover, there is no "justice" here either way--it's just rich people suing each other.
The jury found against Musk - what exactly are you talking about?
Like any case involving legal matters, they are talking about things they deeply do not understand.
More shocking than the sheer incorrectness of the legal analysis I see here often is the confidence with which it is offered.
The Dunning Kruger effect is very, very strong on HN. Also, many folks believe they are an expert in their own domain, so they must be an expert in all...you can see the Nobel disease play out in the minor leagues here.
It turns out 'stealing a charity' is strictly defined in California law as 'commercializing it with Microsoft instead of my car company.' Glad we finally got that clarified
Asking for a hundred billion in damages and having your multi-million dollar legal team defeated not on the merits of the case, but because they literally forgot to look at the calendar lol