Elon Musk files a blockbuster document with the U.S. Federal Court, officially suing OpenAI and Microsoft for up to $134 billion. This decade-long feud is finally entering its decisive stage. This article is sourced from Lawyer Mankun, Liu Honglin, compiled, translated, and written by ForesightNews.
(Background recap: Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman, claiming they have turned into Microsoft’s money-printing machine, diverging from the non-profit open-source mission)
(Additional background: Musk’s xAI announces open-sourcing Grok, with 3.14 trillion parameters shocking the industry, directly claiming “OpenAI is a lie”)

Table of Contents

• OpenAI Hurt the Big Brother’s Heart
• From “Taoyuan Alliance” to “See You in Court”: Musk’s Ten Years of Feud
• Lawyer Mankun’s Cold Reflection: Entrepreneurial Spirit and Business

In recent days, the biggest “gossip” in the tech and legal circles is that Elon Musk has once again sued OpenAI.

If before it was just disputes over ideas, this time Musk has pulled out a calculator to convert past emotional debts into real money. On January 16, 2026, Musk submitted a heavy-file to the U.S. Federal Court, formally claiming damages from OpenAI and its core partner Microsoft for up to $134 billion.

What does this number mean? It’s equivalent to directly claiming damages equal to one Intel, or most of a CATL.

As a lawyer specializing in Web3 and tech industries, I see this not just as a high-profile power struggle among top executives, but also as revealing underlying hardcore logic about nonprofit transformation, investor rights protection, and the legal enforceability of business commitments.

OpenAI Hurt the Big Brother’s Heart

In live streams, the top contributor is called the “Big Brother”; meanwhile, in the brutal arena of global AI startups, Musk is that founder who has both invested real money and provided top-tier backing.

In the latest lawsuit, Musk appears quite aggrieved. He claims that without him, today’s OpenAI would not exist. To support this view, he brought in financial economist C. Paul Wazzan as an expert witness to dissect OpenAI’s current valuation. According to the documents, OpenAI’s valuation has now risen to $500 billion, and Musk believes that more than half of this wealth should belong to him.

The specific damages are split into two parts.

First, against OpenAI itself, Musk claims between $65.5 billion and $109.4 billion. The reason is that he provided about $38 million in funding from 2015 to 2018, accounting for 60% of early seed funding. Legally, he argues this was not a simple donation but a trust-like investment based on the “nonprofit mission.” Now that OpenAI has deviated from its original purpose and transformed into a profit-oriented structure, this is essentially a systemic seizure of the original contribution’s value.

Second, against Microsoft, Musk claims between $13.3 billion and $25.1 billion. Musk believes that during its deep integration with OpenAI, Microsoft exploited Musk’s early credit system and technical foundation to unjustly gain excess benefits. Musk’s chief lawyer Steven Molo bluntly pointed out in court that Musk provided not just funds but also critical capabilities needed to build a scalable AI organization. This “unjust enrichment” legal claim essentially accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of colluding in a “shell company listing” capital game, secretly stuffing the open-source fruits that should belong to all humanity into private pockets.

From “Taoyuan Alliance” to “See You in Court”: Musk’s Ten Years of Feud

To understand the basis of this $134 billion claim, we must rewind to 2015. That was a year full of idealism, when Musk, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman held a famous dinner at the Rosewood Hotel in Silicon Valley. The consensus then was: Google’s DeepMind was too powerful, and if AI was monopolized by a big company, humanity might face existential threats. Thus, OpenAI was born, conceived as a non-profit, open-source, human-benefiting laboratory. Musk was then full of confidence, suggesting a funding goal of $1 billion, and promising to cover any shortfall if others didn’t invest.

However, ideals proved fragile in the face of real computational costs. By 2017, OpenAI’s founding team realized that achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) would require annual expenditures in the hundreds of millions for electricity and chips. This is when cracks began to appear. Musk proposed taking full control of OpenAI and merging it into Tesla, believing only this way could they compete with Google. But Altman and Brockman refused, not wanting to hand the company over to another dictator. As a result, in 2018, Musk resigned from the board and cut off subsequent funding, even predicting OpenAI’s success was zero.

What happened next is well known: in 2019, OpenAI created a genius legal structure—a capped-profit subsidiary. This structure allowed them to accept Microsoft’s $1 billion investment, later increased to $13 billion. Musk ridiculed this on social media for years, until ChatGPT exploded in late 2022, finally making him restless. In 2024, he launched his first lawsuit, accusing OpenAI of becoming a closed-source subsidiary of Microsoft.

By 2025, as both sides uncovered more internal emails and diaries during the discovery phase, the conflict escalated. The most notable was Brockman’s diary confession of an “honesty crisis,” where he worried that not telling Musk about the profit-oriented shift was essentially lying. These publicly disclosed “evidence” became Musk’s strongest leverage in claiming the $134 billion damages.

Now, with the court ruling on January 15, 2026, that the case must be tried by a jury, this decade-long feud is finally entering its decisive phase.

Lawyer Mankun’s Cold Reflection: Entrepreneurial Spirit and Business

Although Musk’s lawsuit seems distant from us, this transition from collaboration to betrayal—especially in high-expectation industries like Web3 and AI—is commonplace in the startup world. Every pitfall Musk encountered reminds us to develop more mature business thinking.

First, we must understand that in business, what’s written on paper is rights; what’s spoken is often just bubbles. If Musk hadn’t relied on passionate “gentleman’s agreements” but had used strict contracts at the time of investment—such as share transfer rights upon company restructuring or veto rights on major structural changes—he wouldn’t need to sue for unjust enrichment now. As a lawyer, I often see founders, due to good relationships and passion, reluctant to discuss money and power sharing early on. But when the company’s valuation multiplies hundreds of times, human nature often cannot withstand the test of huge利益.

Second, for Web3 entrepreneurs, the legal boundaries of DAO and foundation models must be carefully guarded. OpenAI’s hybrid structure—nonprofit shell with a profit core—though flexible for fundraising, can easily trigger moral hazards in governance. If your project received community donations early on or promised certain public attributes through governance tokens, then during subsequent commercialization, transparent decision-making and fair compensation mechanisms are essential. Otherwise, Musk’s spinning back will eventually hit those “fake and genuine” projects.

Finally, unjust enrichment, while a legal safety net, is very difficult to prove. Musk’s claim of $134 billion is more about exerting public pressure through such an extreme figure and portraying himself as a deceived victim to a jury. For ordinary entrepreneurs, rather than engaging in costly, epic lawsuits after a breakup, it’s better to clearly include “exit mechanisms” and “mission change compensation” in the first partnership agreement with professional legal help. Good legal services are not just about winning lawsuits but about preventing the need to fight them in the first place.

The case is scheduled for trial in April this year. Musk not only seeks money but also aims for a court injunction. If this lawsuit continues, OpenAI may not go bankrupt, but it will face enormous damages and its business reputation will be stripped away.