Microsoft May Need to Pay Elon Musk $25 Billion? Judge Approves Key Testimony, OpenAI Case to Go to Court Next Month

According to 1M AI News monitoring, in the Elon Musk v. OpenAI and Microsoft "breach of charitable trust" case, the presiding judge ruled on Wednesday that Musk's damages expert, C. Paul Wazzan, an economist from the Berkeley Research Group, can testify in court.

Wazzan's calculation model determined that based on OpenAI's $500 billion valuation, Microsoft's stake in OpenAI minus its investment is valued at $115 billion, with OpenAI's nonprofit entity contributing as much as 29% to this stake, and Musk, due to his early donations and support, should receive credit for up to 75% of this nonprofit entity. Based on this calculation, if the jury finds Microsoft assisted OpenAI in violating its charitable purpose, Microsoft may have to pay up to $25 billion. Microsoft's lawyers argued that the analysis did not distinguish which benefits stemmed from Microsoft's alleged misconduct, but the judge ruled that aiding and abetting would make Microsoft jointly liable for all damages caused to OpenAI, and the jury would determine which investments constitute aiding behavior.

The judge also ruled that Musk's AI safety expert, Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, could testify on the risks of advanced AI but could not cite others' probability estimates of catastrophic harm from AI. Musk's total claim amounts to a maximum of $134 billion, with additional punitive damages planned. Musk pledged this month on X that if successful, all compensation would be donated, with "not a penny of profit taken." The case is scheduled to be heard at the Oakland Federal Court on April 28.