Musk’s $134 Billion Claim in OpenAI Case Questioned by Judge

The federal judge in Elon Musk’s case against OpenAI has reportedly questioned the billionaire’s damage claim.

In court on Friday (March 13), Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers suggested the $134 billion Musk is seeking is based on “numbers out of air” but ruled he can continue to press his case to jurors, the Financial Times (FT) reported.

Lawyers for OpenAI had sought to dismiss evidence from an expert witness to support Musk’s claim, the report added.

Musk, who helped co-found OpenAI, accuses the startup and CEO Sam Altman of defrauding him by rejecting its nonprofit origins after he had made charitable donations to the company.

OpenAI claims the lawsuit is fueled by commercial motives — Musk owns xAI, a competing artificial intelligence startup — and is part of “an ongoing pattern of harassment.” The case is set to go to trial in April in California’s Northern District.

“A jury is going to understand that [Musk’s expert] is pulling these numbers out of the air,” Rogers said at a pretrial hearing.

“Do I find it convincing? Not really. Based on what I’ve seen, do I find it particularly persuasive? Not really,” the judge added.

However, the judge said she was not prepared to dismiss the expert testimony based on “a five-page motion” and would instead let the jury hear the evidence. Rogers had noted during the hearing that if she did exclude Musk’s expert, “this trial is done, because they have no evidence of damages, right?”

That expert is C. Paul Wazzan, an economist for the consulting firm Berkeley Research Group and a venture capitalist.

He had concluded that Musk’s early donation of $38 million, along with his nonmonetary contributions to OpenAI, accounted for 50% to 75% of the value of  OpenAI’s not-for-profit arm, which owns a little more than a quarter of the company’s for-profit business, recently valued at $730 billion.

In other news, Musk announced last week that X Money would launch on the social media platform in early public access starting in April.

This follows years of reporting on the multibillionaire’s plans to turn the social media platform into a super app that offers financial services and other capabilities.

In April 2023 that Musk told workers at the company, then known still as Twitter, that his vision was to make it a $250 billion payments platform, with the social media app becoming a crucial part of users’ financial lives.

“I think it’s possible to become the biggest financial institution in the world,” Musk said at a conference in March 2023.

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.