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.
>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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 when he left the board of OpenAI. He was unsuccessful in that endeavor and later restarted his efforts in xAI after the success of ChatGPT.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
> Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.
> We publish at top machine learning conferences, open-source software tools for accelerating AI research, and release blog posts to communicate our research. We will not keep information private for private benefit, but in the long term, we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
>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".
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.
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 statute of limitations applies 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.
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.
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.
By "fact" you don't mean fact but "whatever the court decides regardless of facts and laws", right?
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.
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.
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.
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 when he left the board of OpenAI. He was unsuccessful in that endeavor and later restarted his efforts in xAI after the success of ChatGPT.
thanks for the snippet
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.
Extreme smartness has its own failure modes
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.
Did you read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
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.
> 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.
Musk only owns 42% of SpaceX; he only takes 42% of the loss as if he continued to own Twitter outright.
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.
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.
Is he though? I find he still has a STRONG positive image among younger tech people..
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?
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.
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.
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*
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.
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.
Anybody read the article:"...that his lawsuits had been filed too late."
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
> One wonders on what grounds?
Invent a time machine; send a lawyer back to file a new lawsuit within the statute of limitations.
To any lawyers in here, is there an argument to be made for the statue of limitations not to apply here
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.
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.
Pretty sure it's the opposite: appeals mostly only work when the decision is not clear cut, and the statute of limitations is.
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.
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.
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?
I hope he appeals. Not cheering for Musk, cheering for the fight.
There's nothing to appeal. Statute of limitations is... just that.
For criminal cases at least, the statue of limitations is not set in stone. But probably for civil, its much more cut and dry.
Cross examination is one of the vanishingly few times you can see billionaires and executives act like human beings instead of sentient PR scripts.
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 think a lot about how there's a very plausible alternate history where Elon Musk controls most of the frontier of AI.
There but for the grace of god go we...
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...
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.
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...
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 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.
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?
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.
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.)
This is what he Grok hopes to become, but probably too late
Who cares if the plaintiff or defendant won? The trial had great expository value regarding all the players involved.
> 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.
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.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone.
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).
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?
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.
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.
Nazi boy lost yet again.
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.
It's funny how they are still calling it "open"AI.
They have open models
lol
https://web.archive.org/web/20160220093339/https://openai.co...
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
> Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.
---
https://web.archive.org/web/20180323231344/https://openai.co...
> We publish at top machine learning conferences, open-source software tools for accelerating AI research, and release blog posts to communicate our research. We will not keep information private for private benefit, but in the long term, we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns.
---
It's about open research.
https://openai.com/research/index/
This was pretty much the quality of Elon's argumentation in court. Turns out "getting sick dunks" wins likes on Twitter, but it doesn't win lawsuits.
Ending a trial over a bureaucratic technicality is not good justice.
Statute of limitations is not a "bureaucratic technicality", it is the law.
It can be both
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.
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.
To a large extent.
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.
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.
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.
Not a lawyer, but - fugitives don't get to run the clock on statute of limitations.
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".
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.
That's just a point about how (annoying) Sam-boosters are.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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