After Elon Musk’s court loss comes the long hot AI summer.

Elon Musk arrives for the second day of his testimony in his trial against OpenAI at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., April 29, 2026. Musk on Monday, May 18, 2026, lost his lawsuit accusing OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, of breaching the company’s founding contract. (Jason Henry/The New York Times)

By DAVID STREITFELD and NATALLIE ROCHA

Elon Musk lost his bid to derail OpenAI. Few will feel sorry for him.

Unless you are a corporate chieftain or a venture capitalist, you might want to take a moment, however, to feel sorry for yourself. The juggernaut of artificial intelligence bearing down on the world is probably not your friend.

If you are a clerk, a programmer, an administrator, a writer, an entry-level knowledge worker of any sort, you have already been warned that AI might replace you. Even if those worries prove overblown in the short term, the new technology could push down incomes.

The speedy collapse of Musk’s legal case Monday will not slow down the juggernaut. If anything, it will speed up. With rising emotions around the country, this could be a long, hot AI summer.

AI critics dismissed the three-week trial in federal court in Oakland, California, as a power struggle between oligarchs that was of little concern to the masses. But it was also a rare glimpse into the seething maw of Silicon Valley as it makes a bid to transform, and possibly take over, the world.

As the AI industry likes to remind us, the stakes could not be higher. “The worst-case situation,” Musk pointed out in his trial testimony, is one where AI will “kill us all.”

Musk was undoubtedly seeking to benefit Elon Musk in his pursuit of OpenAI, the leading AI company, and its CEO, Sam Altman. Musk, 54, argued that OpenAI was trying to make as much money as possible from the beginning, a violation of its self-proclaimed mission as a charity putting humanity first.

Was AI fundamentally a bait and switch? It’s a question that was emphatically worth asking. It would have been nice to have a court ruling that provided a definitive answer.

“The fundamental issue still stands,” said Oren Etzioni, a veteran AI researcher who was the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, a nonprofit. “Can a nonprofit of any kind become a for-profit willy-nilly?”

The nine men and women of the jury did not consider the merits of Musk’s argument but decided that the statute of limitations meant his lawsuit could not proceed.

“The AI trial of the century ends with a whimper,” wrote Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist who is a prominent critic of AI companies. “And so there are some things we will never know.”

Musk’s challenge to OpenAI ended, at least for the moment, rather differently from the recent court cases against social media. Losses in Los Angeles and New Mexico in the last few months, and the specter of more trials to come this year, are putting that part of the tech industry on the defensive.

Any reckoning against AI will have to come in another form at another time.

Musk tried his best. If one of his goals was to humiliate Altman, 41, once a buddy and now a nemesis, he managed to accomplish a bit of that in the court of public opinion. These revelations go to the center of people’s biggest concerns about AI: Can it be trusted? And can the people in charge of it be trusted?

No one at OpenAI ended up looking particularly good in the trial. Musk had accused Altman of “perfidy” and “deceit” and said OpenAI’s leaders had “unjustly enriched” themselves “to the tune of billions of dollars.”

“Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity,” the OpenAI charter states. But if the company is acting in the people’s best interests, why is everyone who works there getting so rich? Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, confirmed his stake was now worth nearly $30 billion. Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder who has since left, said he had a $7 billion stake.

(As for Altman, he has repeatedly maintained he has no direct stake in OpenAI. “I’m doing this because I love it,” he told a Senate subcommittee in 2023. It emerged during the trial, however, that he has stakes worth $2 billion in companies that directly do business with OpenAI. He said he had been recused from negotiating the deals.)

And then there is the question of safety — especially important with a technology so potentially dangerous.

“Obviously we’d comply with/aggressively support all regulation,” Altman told Musk in 2015 in an email that became an exhibit in the trial. But OpenAI, like nearly every tech company, did not end up a fan of regulation at all.

Ross Gerber, the CEO of Gerber Kawasaki, a wealth and investment management firm in Santa Monica, California, that invested in Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, said the lawsuit did not hurt Altman’s reputation or help Musk improve his public perception. “The good news is that people hate both of them,” Gerber said.

“The public is already fearful of AI,” the investor added. “I don’t think they dispelled that in any way through this lawsuit.”

AI has pretty much a green light from Congress, the Trump administration, the courts and Wall Street. There is a scattering of opposition among state regulators and isolated lawmakers, but so far it hasn’t amounted to much. All of which leaves the increasing anger felt by those clerks, administrators, writers and other citizens with pretty much nowhere to go.

Wall Street expects smooth sailing from here. “OpenAI can shift its strategic focus to capitalizing on the A.I. Revolution taking place front and center given its strong market position in the space,” Dan Ives, an analyst, wrote after the verdict.

OpenAI’s public offering, which may be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 trillion, is expected as soon as this year.

Musk did not get a win Monday, but he still has his lawyers and his Ahab-like quest to sink the OpenAI whale. He wrote on the social platform X, “I will be filing an appeal with the Ninth Circuit, because creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America.”