According to the amendment, Musk also wants OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman both ousted and that both executives turn over “all equity and other personal financial benefits received as a result of OpenAI’s profitable operations” to the OpenAI charity.
Musk was a co-founder and lead early investor in OpenAI when the AI giant started as a non-profit AI lab in 2015. Musk and OpenAI eventually parted ways, an event after which Musk left the company and later created the OpenAI competitor XAI in 2023. Through XAI, Musk made an unsolicited bid to acquire OpenAI for $97.4 billion in February 2025.
Following Musk’s departure, OpenAI changed its corporate structure, first from a non-profit to a “capped” for-profit in 2019, and finally to a for-profit public benefit corporation late last year. The company is now reportedly seeking an IPO in the fourth quarter of this year, just months after Musk’s newly-merged XAI and SpaceX made their market debut.
Musk is now claiming that he was duped into thinking he had given money to start a non-profit, when his plan was solely to make a profit.
The lawsuit claims, “Defendants took advantage of that charitable status – tax exemptions, donor contributions, and the reputational credibility of a public-benefit mission – while secretly planning and ultimately wholesale converting OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise designed to generate wasteful spending as well as extraordinary personal wealth for Altman, Brockman, Microsoft, and other investors.”
Now he is asking the court to “end” the for-profit conversion and reorganization and return the funds to the nonprofit. OpenAI has denied the allegations.
The amendment states, “The remedies Musk wishes to seek are strictly connected to his purpose in bringing this lawsuit: to prevent the subordination of a public charity – which he co-founded and of which he was a primary supporter during its early years – to private, for-profit interests.”
But, according to the findings of a New Yorker investigation published Monday, Musk was involved in discussions as early as September 2017 about reorganizing OpenAI as a for-profit company, and he sought majority control of any for-profit structure.
The case, which has been a bitter legal dispute between the parties, will be heard later this month. Both the parties are trying their best to resolve the ongoing conflict in the court. On Monday, OpenAI sent a letter to the attorneys general of Delaware and California asking them to investigate Musk and fellow competitor Meta for “unfair and anti-competitive behavior.”
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