Lawsuit of the Century: Musk Seeks $134B from OpenAI and Microsoft

On January 17, 2026, Elon Musk's lawyers filed an unprecedented lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The plaintiff seeks damages and disgorgement of "wrongful gains" estimated at $134 billion. The main argument is that OpenAI's transformation from a non-profit lab into a de facto closed Microsoft subsidiary violates the 2015 founding agreements.

Musk claims that GPT-4 and subsequent models were built upon his early investments intended for Open Source. Experts call this process the main threat to OpenAI's corporate structure. If the court sides with Musk, it could lead to forced disclosure of model weights or massive financial sanctions.

Source: Reuters / Bloomberg