Two Hours of Deliberation

Nine jurors. Two hours of deliberation. Twenty-six claims at the original federal complaint's peak. Three surviving claims at trial. Zero claims surviving the verdict. One hundred fifty billion dollars of maximum disgorgement exposure if the verdict had gone the other way. One hundred thirty billion dollars of OpenAI Foundation equity stake under the October 28, 2025 recapitalization. Thirty-eight million dollars of total Musk contributions per his sworn trial testimony. Forty-four million per the legal complaint. Eight years from the January 2, 2016 Sutskever-Musk "less open / Yup" email exchange to the August 2024 federal filing date. Three years of statute-of-limitations runway on the breach-of-charitable-trust claim; two years on the unjust-enrichment claim.

The verdict in Musk v. Altman came in this morning at the federal courthouse on Clay Street in Oakland, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California. The companion piece, The Calendar Technicality, makes the doctrinal argument that the procedural dismissal is the substantive determination California charitable-trust law would have produced on the merits as well. This piece takes the same conclusion through the numbers. The dollar-and-time math closed the merits door before the doctrinal door even came into view.

Two hours, in context

Federal-court civil-trial deliberations on complex commercial cases typically run between one and five days. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts' annual judicial-business reports show median civil-jury deliberation in the multi-day range for cases with three or more issues to resolve and dollar exposure above one billion. The two-hour deliberation in Musk v. Altman is roughly one to two standard deviations below the median for cases of this complexity. The brevity is not a function of jury inattention. The trial ran three weeks. Roughly four hours of testimony came from Altman alone on May 12, with cross-examination opening with Musk's lead trial counsel Steven Molo asking "Are you completely trustworthy?" Live trial testimony also came from Greg Brockman, former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, and former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis.

What the two hours signals is that the legal question the jury was asked to resolve had a clean answer. The three surviving claims at trial — breach of charitable trust against OpenAI / Altman / Brockman, unjust enrichment against the same defendants, and aiding-and-abetting breach of charitable trust against Microsoft — all fell on a single question: when did Musk know or should have known of the conduct he eventually sued over. The candidate clock-start dates were knowable from the timeline and not seriously contested by the underlying evidence. The jury's role was to apply the applicable statutes (three years on the charitable-trust theories, two years on unjust enrichment) to the dates and confirm the count. Two hours is what that count takes when the dates do not require extensive re-litigation.

The 26-to-zero attrition, with dollar columns

The case began with a much larger surface area and shed it in stages. Pretrial motions disposed of roughly two-thirds of the original claims on substantive doctrinal grounds. Summary judgment in January 2026 cleared most of the Microsoft-specific theories. The two-hour verdict closed the remaining three.

The pattern the table makes visible is that the dollar-exposure rows fall at the verdict stage, not at the pretrial stage. The largest-exposure theory (charitable trust at $150B disgorgement) survived all the way to the jury because it presented the cleanest doctrinal anchor in California law — the Holt v. College of Osteopathic Physicians & Surgeons standard that a person with sufficient special interest may bring an action to enjoin breach of a charitable trust. Musk's case argued he had sufficient special interest as a founder and major donor. The case died on the timing question, not on the special-interest question; the special-interest question was not reached.

The dollar exposure

The numbers around the case form a stack that is worth flattening into a single column. From smallest to largest:

The corporate-structure transition over the case's eleven-year window is the dollar pattern most worth tracking. From the December 2015 nonprofit founding (zero equity value) through the 2019 capped-profit conversion (private valuation in the single-digit billions) to the October 28, 2025 PBC recapitalization (500 billion enterprise value; 130 billion controlled by the Foundation; 27 percent held by Microsoft; the remainder by employees and outside investors), the curve is roughly six orders of magnitude across eleven years. The Foundation's controlled position carries an additional warrant: if OpenAI Group's per-share value increases tenfold over fifteen years, the Foundation receives a substantial further equity grant. The warrant is the contingent upside layer the recap left in place and is not included in the $130 billion figure. Musk's disgorgement theory asked the court to push approximately one hundred fifty billion of that value back into the Foundation's controlled column. The Foundation's controlled column already stood at approximately one hundred thirty billion at the time of trial.

The arithmetic the jury did not need to perform is worth doing externally. If Musk had prevailed on all surviving claims at their pleaded maxima, the Foundation's equity stake would have moved from approximately $130 billion to approximately $280 billion, the for-profit's effective controlled-by-Foundation share would have risen from 26% to a number closer to 56%, and Microsoft's 27% position would have been diluted by roughly the same factor required to honor the disgorgement transfer. The transfer is the operative remedy Musk's case proposed. The transfer did not happen because the case did not reach the transfer-considering merits stage. The transfer remained, throughout the case, conditional on the timing question that the jury answered against Musk in two hours.

The timing math

The three-year statute of limitations under California Code of Civil Procedure §338(d) (fraud SOL) was the load-bearing legal mechanic on the charitable-trust theories; the §343 four-year residual SOL was the alternative-theory framing and would have placed the filing window opening in August 2020 instead of August 2021. The unjust-enrichment claim ran on a separate two-year clock that placed its window opening even later, in August 2022. The August 2024 federal filing date created a window opening in August 2021. The candidate clock-start dates the trial record established were four:

Any of the four anchors places the filing outside the three-year window. Musk's rebuttal at trial was that he did not fully discover the true extent of the fraud until 2023, on which theory the filing would be within the window. The rebuttal required the jury to find that none of the four anchors triggered the limitations clock, and that the 2023 PBC-conversion announcement materially changed Musk's knowledge of the conduct. The jury rejected the rebuttal in two hours, which is what rejected the rebuttal looks like when the anchors are four and the jury believes each of them is independently sufficient.

The continuing-breach theory Musk's appellate counsel will need to advance at the Ninth Circuit is the theory that mission drift in a charitable trust does not reset the clock at each subsequent corporate restructuring, but that the cumulative drift constitutes a continuing breach the limitations clock cannot exhaust. The theory exists in the California case law, but the Holt anchor and subsequent cases have largely confined it to specific categories of trustee misconduct rather than to mission-drift claims by former donors. The Ninth Circuit's base rate for reversing district-court statute-of-limitations dismissals on continuing-breach theories in California charitable-trust cases is, on a quick survey of the published case law, low single digits.

The witness load

The three-week trial calendar contained roughly fifteen named witnesses, with the principal testimony falling on these dates:

• April 27: Trial opens; opening statements
• April 28-30: Musk testifies
• May 5-7: Greg Brockman testifies
• May 7: Shivon Zilis testifies on her 2020-2023 OpenAI board service and on conversations with Musk about OpenAI's corporate structure in 2017-2018
• May 12: Sam Altman testifies (~4 hours, including Molo's cross-examination)
• Week 3: Ilya Sutskever, Satya Nadella, Kevin Scott testify
• May 14: Closing arguments
• May 18: Verdict (<2 hours deliberation)

The full witness list and the substantive content of the testimony are discussed in the companion Calendar Technicality piece. The numerical observation worth carrying here is that fifteen witnesses across three weeks is the trial load California charitable-trust cases at this dollar exposure typically carry, and that the verdict was rendered on a single question that did not require the jury to resolve the substantive disputes most of those fifteen witnesses had been brought to address.

What the Ninth Circuit gets to review

The appellate-review standards for a statute-of-limitations dismissal split between de novo review on the legal question of whether the limitations period applies and clearly erroneous review on the underlying factual determinations. The legal question Musk's appeal would need to win is whether the trial court correctly identified the clock-start anchor. The factual question Musk's appeal cannot easily revisit is the jury's finding that the candidate anchors were each knowable to Musk at the relevant times.

The continuing-breach theory is the most plausible appellate path. The theory would need to argue that the October 28, 2025 PBC recapitalization was itself a discrete breach event that started a fresh three-year clock, regardless of whether the earlier anchors had triggered earlier clocks. The argument has a doctrinal foothold in California charitable-trust law and a factual foothold in the recap's actual date, which falls within the three years preceding the May 2026 verdict but after the August 2024 filing. The Ninth Circuit would need to find that the trial court erred as a matter of law in not treating each subsequent corporate-structure change as a fresh clock-start. The base rate for that kind of reversal is, on the available statistics, low.

The number that matters for what the verdict actually settles is the appellate-cycle count. A 9th Circuit ruling on the SOL question is likely in twelve to eighteen months. Any further appellate review (en banc; Supreme Court certiorari) would add another twelve to eighteen months. The Foundation-controlled $130B equity stake is, on the calendar, structurally settled beyond private-litigation reach by approximately late 2027 to mid-2028 even in the worst case. The numerical structure of the appellate process is the final block on the procedural-versus-substantive question; the dismissal Musk is calling a calendar technicality is, in calendar terms, durable.

Coda

The verdict's numerical content is the article in the article. Nine jurors took two hours to resolve a case with $150 billion at stake because the three-year clock had four candidate anchor dates and all four pre-dated the filing window by margins between five months and five years. Twenty-six original claims attritted to two surviving claims attritted to zero prevailing claims through a sequence of doctrinal and procedural gates that each narrowed the case's dollar exposure without ever needing to resolve the substantive question of whether the founding-mission promise had been breached. The Foundation's $130 billion equity stake remained, throughout, the structural fact the case was nominally asking the court to revisit. The case ended without the court revisiting it.

What the numbers show is that the verdict is durable in the dimension Musk's appellate framing is contesting. The clock will not move. The anchors will not change. The 9th Circuit's most plausible reversal path is the continuing-breach theory on the 2025 recap, and that path's base rate is low. The substantive question of whether the OpenAI Foundation's controlled position is adequate to the structural stakes of a $500 billion AI lab remains open. The numerical question of whether private donor litigation can reach that question is closed.