Jury hands victory to Sam Altman and OpenAI in battle with Elon Musk
A jury ruled in favor of Sam Altman and OpenAI in a legal battle against Elon Musk. The jury found Altman and OpenAI's president not liable for breaking contracts made with Musk during the startup's founding. This verdict, while advisory, is expected to be upheld by the presiding judge, marking a significant moment in the ongoing conflict between these tech leaders.
- ▪The jury's decision is a rebuke of Musk's claims that Altman stole a charity through his leadership of OpenAI.
- ▪Musk's lawsuit sought $134 billion to be redistributed from OpenAI's for-profit arm to its non-profit.
- ▪The trial featured testimony from several prominent Silicon Valley executives, including Musk and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
4 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 18 hours. Coverage spans 2 points on the political spectrum — 2 lean left, 1 centre.
- ▪ Jury rules in favour of OpenAI and Sam Altman in Elon Musk lawsuit - Digital Watch Observatory — Google News
- ▪ Elon Musk Rages Against “Terrible Activist Oakland Judge” & Jury After Losing $150B OpenAI Trial; Accuses Sam Altman Again Of “Stealing A Charity” — Deadline
- ▪ Court rules in favor of OpenAI and Sam Altman in lawsuit brought by Elon Musk — ABC News — Top
The Guardian — Business publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under business. We currently carry 8 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — Business |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/18/sam-altman-trial-victory-elon-musk-openai |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 17:37:37 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T17:49:56.689Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T17:49:56.689Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 64H_3XHNj93T · 9 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Composite: Getty Images, ReutersView image in fullscreenElon Musk and Sam Altman. Composite: Getty Images, ReutersAI (artificial intelligence)Jury hands victory to Sam Altman and OpenAI in battle with Elon MuskOpenAI CEO and president found not liable for breaking contracts made with Musk when founding the startupNick Robins-EarlyMon 18 May 2026 13.37 EDTLast modified on Mon 18 May 2026 13.44 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleA jury ruled in favor of Sam Altman in the culmination of a long and bitter legal battle that pitted the richest person in the world against a leader of the AI boom.The federal jury in Oakland, California, found Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, not liable for unjustly enriching themselves and breaking contracts made with Musk…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Business.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Guardian — Business
