The tech trial of the year, Musk v. Altman, was ultimately a fight for control. Elon Musk argued that Sam Altman, with whom he helped found the now-massive company OpenAI, shouldn't direct the future of AI. Altman's lawyers, in turn, poked at Musk's own credibility. A jury came to a verdict on Monday after just two hours of deliberation, dismissing Musk's claims due to the statute of limitations.
In a strictly legal sense, three weeks of testimony added up to nothing. But the trial offered a more damning broader takeaway: Almost nobody in this saga seems worth trusting. Some of the most powerful people in tech seem temperamentally incapable …
Reporters and lawyers line up outside the federal courthouse in Oakland for jury selection. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
A jury ruled unanimously Monday that Elon Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Microsoft, finding the defendants not liable on all claims after less than two hours of deliberation.
The nine-person jury found Altman, co-founder Greg Brockman, and OpenAI not liable on the breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment claims. On the same statute-of-limitations grounds, the jury rejected Musk’s claim that Microsoft aided and abetted a breach of OpenAI’s charitable trust.
The verdict, reached on the first morning of deliberations, caps a three-week trial in federal court in Oakland that drew testimony from some of the most prominent figures in the tech industry and threatened to reshape the AI landscape.
Steven Molo, a lawyer for Musk, reportedly said in court that he was preserving the right to appeal but had not yet decided how to proceed.
Microsoft’s statement: “The facts and the timeline in this case have long been clear, and we welcome the jury’s decision to dismiss these claims as untimely. We remain committed to our work with OpenAI to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world.”
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to the safe development of artificial intelligence, contributing an estimated $38 million before leaving the board in 2018.
He filed suit in 2024, claiming Altman, Brockman, and others had transformed OpenAI into a for-profit venture, betraying the mission he helped fund. Microsoft, which has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, was later added as a defendant.
The three claims that went to trial are breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment against OpenAI, Altman, and Brockman, and aiding and abetting breach of charitable trust against Microsoft. The nine-person jury’s verdict is advisory; U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will make the final determination on liability.
A central exhibit for Musk’s case was a March 2018 email in which Scott questioned whether OpenAI’s donors knew about its commercial plans, writing that he couldn’t imagine they had funded an open effort “so that they could then go build a closed, for profit thing on its back.” Microsoft went on to invest billions anyway.
Scott testified that he wrote the email as a skeptic evaluating the deal, not raising an alarm about its mission — and that he had donor Reid Hoffman, not Musk, in mind.
In closing arguments, Microsoft’s attorney Russell Cohen of Dechert told jurors the email showed only that “Microsoft took time to get answers to those questions before entering a risky and important partnership.”
A key defense argument across both closing days centered on a September 24, 2020 tweet in which Musk wrote that OpenAI had come to “seem like the opposite of open” and appeared “essentially captured by Microsoft.”
Cohen argued the post proved Musk believed his alleged promises were broken years before he filed suit — potentially putting his claims outside the three-year statute of limitations. He closed his argument by urging jurors to find the claims time-barred.
“We just ask you to remember one thing, the tweet,” Cohen said, asking them to find that the statute of limitations prevents Musk from making the claims against Microsoft.
On the opening day of trial, Microsoft and OpenAI announced an amended partnership, making Microsoft’s IP license non-exclusive, freeing OpenAI to serve products on any cloud provider, and ending Microsoft’s revenue-share payments to OpenAI. Amazon moved the next day to bring OpenAI’s models to its cloud platform.
Musk has asked the judge to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles at OpenAI, unwind the company’s 2025 conversion to a for-profit public benefit corporation, and return what he calls wrongful gains to the OpenAI nonprofit.
His damages expert initially put the combined figure as high as $134 billion. The judge questioned those numbers, and the remedies phase is being heard separately.
Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo)
Layoffs at a Starbucks support center in Seattle will impact 252 corporate jobs, including a number of vice presidents, directors and senior managers, according to a new state filing on Monday.
A Washington Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification said that the cuts “will result in the relocation or contracting out of certain of the employer’s operations or the partners’ positions.”
Layoffs of 300 corporate employees at the coffee giant were first reported last week. They came on the heels of a previous WARN notice detailing the elimination of 61 tech roles in Seattle.
The cuts aim to “further sharpen focus, prioritize work, reduce complexity, and lower costs,” a spokesperson said by email on Friday.
The affected roles announced Monday skew toward mid-to-senior corporate positions, with nine vice presidents listed, directors across many functions, senior managers, and senior-level specialists and analysts throughout. Job functions span finance, legal, brand, tech, HR and operations.
Starbucks said in the filing that the expected date of the first separations will be July 17, with all separations completed by Feb. 1, 2027.
Starbucks did not announce any new store closures last week, but the company is shuttering select regional support offices in Atlanta, Burbank, Chicago and Dallas while maintaining its Seattle headquarters and offices in New York, Toronto and Coral Gables, Fla. The company is also opening a new office in Nashville.
The company cut nearly 2,000 corporate roles last year, according to past reports.
AI is rapidly reshaping how work gets done in companies and organizations. In celebrating National Small Business Month, we want to acknowledge the unique challenges that growing business leaders face as AI creates both opportunity and risk. They face constant tradeoffs between moving fast, managing risk, and keeping operations stable under pressure. At the same time, cybercriminals are moving faster, their attacks are becoming more targeted, and AI is helping increase efficacy of the threats. In fact, AI-automated phishing is 4.5 times more effective than traditional cyberattacks. It takes only one convincing phishing email, and one stray click to enable a breach.1
The key question is: How can we maximize the benefits of AI while staying protected in a rapidly evolving threat landscape?
Today’s cybersecurity landscape is defined by speed, scale, and automation—trends that disproportionately affect growing businesses. According to the 2025 Microsoft Digital Defense Report, Microsoft now processes more than 100 trillion security signals every day and blocks 4.5 million new malware files daily, underscoring just how industrialized cybercrime has become. Increasingly, cyberattackers are using AI to automate phishing, generate highly convincing scams, and rapidly adapt malware, making cyberattacks more frequent and harder to detect.
For businesses that often lack dedicated security teams or round-the-clock monitoring, this shift has real business consequences: disrupted operations, financial loss from ransomware or fraud, and lasting damage to customer trust. The report also notes that most modern cyberattacks now target identities, like user accounts and access—a challenge for organizations relying on cloud services and remote work without strong protections in place for accounts and access. As AI continues to amplify both the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks, cybersecurity is no longer just an IT issue for businesses—it’s a core business risk that can directly affect resilience and growth.
Source: Cyber Signals Issue 9.2
Building a foundation of trust
In this new reality, security becomes the foundation of trust—helping growing businesses protect their operations, preserve customer trust, and move forward with confidence. For business owners, cybersecurity isn’t just about stopping cyberattacks; it’s about keeping the business running day to day. When systems go down, orders can’t be processed, employees can’t do their work, and customers are left waiting or wondering whether their data is safe. Even short disruptions can have outsized consequences for growing businesses, from lost revenue and stalled growth to reputational damage that’s hard to repair. By making security a core part of how the business operates—not an afterthought—even the smallest businesses put themselves in a stronger position to withstand disruptions, maintain credibility with customers, and create a stable foundation for long-term growth.
Source: The Devastating Impact of Ransomware Attacks on Small Businesses.3
Simple, built‑in security for your growing business
Effective security must be simple, approachable, and fit the realities of running a business with limited time and resources. Many growing businesses don’t have dedicated security teams or the time and resources to manage complex tools, yet they still need protection that keeps pace with modern threats. Microsoft Security is built with this in mind, offering integrated, easy‑to‑manage protections that help safeguard devices, identities, email, and cloud apps without adding unnecessary complexity. Microsoft 365 Business Premium combines productivity and built-in security in one streamlined solution, with centralized visibility and automation that reduces manual effort. It helps protect your users, devices, and data across your business, so you can stay focused on customers and day-to-day operations. By providing security that works quietly in the background—and scales as the business grows—Microsoft helps businesses of all sizes protect what matters most without slowing them down.
Allowing people to operate devices and applications without conditional access increases risks. Getting that done was a huge success for us.“
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
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