Elon Musk looks on as President Donald Trump speaks at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, Nov. 19, 2025.
Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images
Elon Musk is seeking to have OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman removed from their roles as officers in the company as part of a case that’s expected to go to trial later this month.
In a legal filing on Tuesday, Musk’s lawyers laid out specific remedies their client is seeking if a judge and jury determine that Altman and OpenAI defrauded Musk, the world’s richest person.
Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in 2024, claiming the artificial intelligence company that he helped start almost a decade earlier “assiduously manipulated” and “deceived” him into donating $38 million, based on promises that the entity would remain a nonprofit. The two sides have since been embroiled in a public war of words, in addition to their legal battle and budding business rivalry.
“Plaintiff will seek an order removing Altman as a director from the OpenAI nonprofit board and removing both Altman and Brockman as officers of the OpenAI for-profit,” Musk’s lawyers said in Tuesday’s filing. “Removal of a charity’s officers and directors is a common remedy where those individuals fail to protect or carry out the charity’s public mission.”
Musk is also asking the court to make OpenAI revert to operating as an actual nonprofit, according to the filing. The company completed a restructuring in October, and is now run as a nonprofit with a 26% stake in the for-profit arm, which includes ChatGPT.
Jury selection for the case is slated to begin on April 27, in a federal court in Oakland, California. OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk, Altman and others co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit AI lab in 2015. Musk left OpenAI in 2018, after trying to convince executives there to merge it with Tesla, his electric vehicle company.
In 2023, Musk launched a competing company called xAI, which developed the AI image generator and chatbot Grok. In February, Musk’s SpaceX acquired xAI, which also owns X (formerly Twitter) in a deal that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX recently filed confidential paperwork with the SEC for what will likely be a record IPO.
On Monday, OpenAI sent a letter to the California and Delaware attorneys general, urging them to investigate “improper and anti-competitive behavior” by Musk and his associates ahead of the trial. In the letter, OpenAI strategy chief Jason Kwon alleged that Musk has been working to undermine OpenAI through various “attacks” on the company, including by “coordinating his efforts” with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Musk’s attorneys previously said, in a January filing, that their client should receive up to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and lead investor Microsoft, calling them “wrongful gains” that the companies had received as a result of his early work with and financial support of OpenAI.
In Tuesday’s filing, Musk’s lawyers said their client is seeking “to return all ill-gotten gains, including Microsoft’s, to the OpenAI charity.”
— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
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