Musk offers to give all damages to OpenAI’s nonprofit, hoping to outmaneuver Altman in court

Elon Musk just tweaked his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, and the move is actually pretty clever. On Tuesday, he filed an amendment clarifying that any money recovered from the case should go straight to OpenAI’s charitable nonprofit arm — not into his own pockets.

His lawyer, Marc Toberoff, made it crystal clear to The Wall Street Journal: Musk “is not seeking a single dollar for himself.” The whole point, according to Toberoff, is to strip away the distraction that OpenAI has been leaning on — the claim that this lawsuit is just Musk trying to harass and harm a company he helped co-found but now competes against.

Let’s be real: Musk co-founded OpenAI back in 2015 as a nonprofit focused on safe AI development. He left in 2018, and since then, OpenAI has pivoted hard toward commercial products — ChatGPT, GPT-4, all the big money-makers. Musk has been vocal about how he thinks the company abandoned its original mission. This lawsuit is his legal attempt to make that stick.

But here’s the thing that makes this amendment interesting: by explicitly saying he doesn’t want any money for himself, Musk is trying to undercut OpenAI’s best defense. If the lawsuit looks like a personal vendetta or a competitor trying to score a payout, it’s easier for OpenAI to dismiss it as sour grapes. Now Musk is saying, “I don’t want a cent — I just want the nonprofit to get back what it lost.” That’s harder to spin as harassment.

It’s also a smart PR move. Musk knows his public persona is polarizing. By framing this as a crusade for the original mission rather than a personal grudge match, he gets to look like the principled founder fighting to restore integrity. Whether you buy that or not, it’s a better narrative than “billionaire sues rival over money.”

Of course, there’s still a long road ahead. Courts don’t always love these kinds of mission-based lawsuits, and OpenAI will likely argue that the company’s shift was necessary to fund research. But this amendment at least forces them to engage on the substance rather than just attack Musk’s motives.

I’m curious to see how Sam Altman responds. If he tries to paint Musk as a hypocrite — which wouldn’t be hard, given Musk’s own for-profit AI ventures at xAI — that might backfire if Musk keeps hammering the “I just want the nonprofit to get its due” angle. Either way, this just got a lot more interesting.