Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has not been winning in court lately.
His loss on Monday in his lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman is the latest in a string of legal defeats or settlements.
Late last year he agreed to settle with former Twitter executives and thousands of former employees of the social platform, which he has renamed X, after fighting for years to pay them nothing.
Then in March, he lost a case brought against him by investors of Twitter, who claimed they were misled by public statements he made during the takeover.
In May, another judge reversed certain actions by DOGE, the government cost-cutting department Musk helped create and led last year, finding cuts to some grants were “a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.”
Now that he’s also lost his high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI, is it possible that Musk will be less prone to picking fights?
“No one is invincible,” said Shubha Ghosh, a lawyer and law professor at Syracuse University.
But it may take more significant losses for Musk to back off, or change his aggressive style, in the courts.
“In a lot of ways, he is just another businessperson asserting his rights,” Ghosh said. “I don’t think he’s abusing the legal system. Whether he uses it effectively, I’m not sure.”
In addition to a tendency towards the unconventional, Musk also has the deepest pockets on earth. He is poised to soon be the world’s first trillionaire given his stake in SpaceX, another of his companies that is expected to be publicly listed in the near future.
The sheer size of Musk’s wealth makes it seem unlikely that even a string of losses, related costs or fines would put him off fighting or filing future lawsuits.
“I don’t see him stopping,” said Dorothy Lund, a lawyer and law professor at Columbia Law School. “It seems like there is no one who has been able to put real consequences on him or his actions.”
A recent fine of $1.5m (£1.1m) from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over his failure to disclose his initial accumulation of Twitter stock, for instance, is insignificant for someone like Musk.
When his multi-billion-dollar pay package for Tesla was invalidated by a judge in December 2024, Musk simply reincorporated the entire company in Texas and got a potentially even bigger pay package approved by shareholders.
“He does what he wants and sometimes gets a slap on the wrist, so why would he change?” Lund said.
On Monday, Musk criticised the decision against him in the OpenAI case, writing on X that it created “a free license to loot charities if you can keep the looting quiet for a few years!”
He also insulted the judge overseeing the case as a “terrible activist” and vowed to appeal the verdict.
Reuters‘He’s not afraid’
Musk has a “larger than life personality”, Ghosh added, which makes him different from many business leaders.
He seemed to decide that the right time to get SpaceX onto the public stock market was during his high-profile trial against Altman, a mentee-turned-rival-turned-public enemy. That alone sets him apart from most people in business.
When executives have a company that is about to go public, they typically enter into what’s known as a “quiet period”.
It is a period of time, mandated by the SEC, during which leaders of a business actively preparing to list on a public stock exchange are not supposed to make certain statements. Many chief executives say as little as possible during a quiet period, as even general statements on a company’s growth are usually prohibited.
Lund noted that there are not many people who compare to Musk in terms of his ability, and apparent desire, to keep fighting in court and in public after so many dings.
“He is not afraid of public opinion, he’s not afraid of taking big swings,” Lund said. She noted that kind of disregard for risk is “valuable in entrepreneurs”. But the courtroom is not a boardroom.
Lund noted that even notoriously aggressive corporate figures like Carl Icahn, the famed “corporate raider” who inspired the greed-driven character of Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street, did not seem to have the brazenness of Musk.
“If and when this will blow up for him, I don’t know,” Lund said.
The only analogous public figure for her is President Donald Trump, who is notorious for making seemingly off-the-cuff remarks in public and taking legal action against perceived foes.
“Musk is a singular individual,” Lund said, “but negative things never seem to stick to either of them.”
