Closing arguments ended Thursday afternoon in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers Oakland courtroom, sending nine jurors home for the weekend before deliberations begin Monday in the most consequential AI lawsuit of the decade. At stake: up to $150 billion in damages, Sam Altman's removal as OpenAI CEO, and the potential unwinding of the $500 billion corporate restructure that transformed the nonprofit lab into the world's most valuable AI company.

Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 believing it would remain a nonprofit, was not in the courtroom for closing arguments. He was in Beijing as part of Trump's state-visit delegation, his first trip to China as xAI's CEO. The optics could not be starker: while his lawyers argued that Altman stole a charity, Musk was cutting AI deals with the Chinese government.

Musk's lead counsel Steven Molo told the jury that five witnesses including Musk himself, former OpenAI board members, and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever had testified that Altman was untrustworthy. The prosecution framed the case as a charitable-trust violation: Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman allegedly deceived donors and volunteers who believed they were building AI for humanity's benefit, not shareholders' profits.

OpenAI's defense centered on timing. They argued Musk pushed for for-profit funding himself when the nonprofit was burning $50 million annually with no revenue path. Chat logs from 2017 show Musk suggesting Tesla acquire OpenAI or raise billion-dollar funding rounds. Altman's lawyers said Musk only sued after his attempt to merge OpenAI with Tesla was rejected by the board.

The jury must answer two questions: Did Altman and Brockman violate their fiduciary duty to the original nonprofit mission? And was Musk aware of the for-profit plans before August 2021 (the statute of limitations cutoff)? If they find for Musk, the remedies phase beginning Monday will consider removing both executives and potentially reversing the corporate restructure that created OpenAI LP.

The stakes extend far beyond OpenAI. A Musk victory would freeze the company's planned $1 trillion IPO and trigger mass departures of employees whose equity would become worthless. Competitors including Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and Musk's own Grok would benefit from OpenAI's paralysis. Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, faces potential writedowns if the partnership unravels.

Judge Gonzalez Rogers retains sole authority to issue the final ruling, though she historically follows jury recommendations in complex commercial cases. The nine-person advisory jury (six women, three men) will deliver their verdict first, followed by her binding decision on damages and remedies. Legal experts expect deliberations to last 2-4 days given the case's complexity and $150 billion price tag.