Musk Tells Court: I Don’t Want OpenAI’s Money, Give It Back to the Nonprofit

Elon Musk just made a move that’s either genuinely principled or brilliantly tactical, depending on how you look at it.

On Tuesday, Musk amended his ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman. The key change? He’s now explicitly stating that any money recovered from the case should go back to OpenAI’s charitable nonprofit arm, not into his own pocket.

His lawyer, Marc Toberoff, was pretty direct about it: Musk “is not seeking a single dollar for himself.”

This is a smart play. One of OpenAI’s main defenses has been that Musk is just a sore loser trying to harass a competitor. By redirecting any potential damages to the nonprofit, Musk strips away that argument. He’s basically saying, “I don’t want your money—I want you to honor the mission you started with.”

Toberoff told The Wall Street Journal that this amendment removes the “distracting claims” that the lawsuit is about personal vendettas or harming OpenAI. Instead, it frames the entire case around a single question: Did OpenAI abandon its founding charter?

For context, Musk was an early co-founder and major donor to OpenAI when it was a pure nonprofit focused on safe, open AI research. He left in 2018, and since then, OpenAI has transformed into a capped-profit company, taken billions from Microsoft, and become one of the most valuable private companies in the world. Musk, meanwhile, launched xAI to compete directly.

The timing is interesting. This amendment comes as OpenAI is reportedly in the middle of a massive fundraising round that could value it at over $300 billion. Musk’s lawsuit isn’t going to stop that train, but it does keep the pressure on Altman and the board to explain how a nonprofit ended up running a for-profit empire.

Honestly, I’m not sure how this plays out legally. The original OpenAI charter was never a binding contract—it was more of a mission statement. Courts don’t typically enforce mission drift. But Musk’s argument has always been that he donated to a nonprofit with specific promises, and those promises were broken. Now he’s saying, “If I’m right, the money should go back to the cause, not to me.”

That’s a harder argument for OpenAI to dismiss as sour grapes.

Whether this is genuine altruism or just good legal strategy, it’s a bold move. And it forces the conversation back to where it probably should have been all along: What exactly did OpenAI promise, and did they keep that promise?