Elon Musk Seeks Up to $134 Billion USD in Legal Showdown Against OpenAI and Microsoft

Summary

• Elon Musk is escalating his long-running feud with OpenAI and Microsoft by demanding between $79 billion and $134 billion in alleged wrongful gains tied to his early funding and support
• The claim pegs Musk’s supposed share of value to OpenAI’s roughly $500 billion valuation and has triggered a high-stakes jury trial set for April in Oakland, California
• OpenAI is pushing back in court and in public, arguing through newly published internal documents that Musk supported a for-profit structure as long as he could retain control and is now using litigation to boost his rival AI venture

The Elon Musk–OpenAI war has shifted from subtweets to subpoenas, turning a once-utopian AI nonprofit story into a full-blown boardroom drama. Musk is not just asking for a refund on his early OpenAI bet. He wants startup-style upside on what has become one of the most valuable companies in tech, claiming his roughly $38 million USD in seed support and halo effect helped mint tens of billions in gains for both OpenAI and strategic partner Microsoft.

At the core is a simple but explosive question that hits every founder, donor and builder watching AI: when a mission-driven lab pivots into a profit machine, who actually owns the upside. Musk’s experts say OpenAI captured between $65.5 billion USD and $109.4 billion USD off his early backing, with Microsoft allegedly riding another $13.3 billion USD to $25.1 billion USD on top. OpenAI’s response is to drag the fight into the open, laying out call notes, diary entries and governance timelines to argue that Musk pushed for a for-profit structure, demanded absolute control, floated letting his children inherit AGI, and then walked when he could not own the cap table.

That narrative, detailed in OpenAI’s blog The truth Elon left out, reframes the lawsuit as the latest move in a longer play to slow OpenAI down while xAI scales up. It underlines how quickly AI’s idealist phase has been swallowed by trillion-dollar IPO rumors, sovereign-cloud contracts and ad products inside chatbots. With a federal judge clearing this case for a jury, the trial is set to become a live stress test for how tech’s most powerful players justify mission pivots, blended nonprofit–for-profit structures and the idea that reputation, deal flow and recruiting muscle are worth tens of billions when the valuation hits escape velocity.