Elon Musk loses again but vows to keep fighting

Monday’s ruling against Elon Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI and co-founder Sam Altman was, by any measure, a significant legal defeat. It was also, by most expert assessments, unlikely to change anything about how the world’s richest man operates.

That is the peculiar reality of Elon Musk in 2026, a man who has lost in court repeatedly, across multiple cases, in multiple jurisdictions, and who responds to each setback not with recalibration but with defiance, insults, and a promise to keep fighting.

“I don’t see him stopping,” said Dorothy Lund, a 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.”

The losses have been piling up. Late last year, after years of attempting to pay them nothing, Musk agreed to settle with former Twitter executives and thousands of ex-employees of the platform he renamed X. In March, investors who claimed he misled them with public statements during his Twitter takeover won their case against him. That same month, a judge dismissed his lawsuit against advertisers who had walked away from the platform. In May, a separate judge reversed certain actions taken by DOGE, the government cost-cutting body Musk helped create and led, ruling that cuts to some grants were, in the court’s words, “a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.”

And now, the OpenAI case. Gone.

Musk’s response to Monday’s ruling was entirely in character. He took to X to blast the decision, writing that it created “a free license to loot charities if you can keep the looting quiet for a few years!” He called the judge overseeing the case “a terrible activist” and announced he would appeal.

So what keeps him going? The answers, legal experts say, are not complicated, they are just unusual in their combination.

There is, first, the money. Musk is on course to become the world’s first trillionaire, driven largely by his stake in SpaceX, which is expected to go public in the near future. At that level of wealth, the financial arithmetic of losing lawsuits simply does not work the same way it does for everyone else. A $1.5 million fine from the US Securities and Exchange Commission over his failure to properly disclose his initial accumulation of Twitter stock barely registered, a rounding error on a balance sheet of that magnitude. When a Delaware judge invalidated his multi-billion-dollar Tesla pay package in December 2024, Musk’s response was not to negotiate or comply. He reincorporated Tesla in Texas and walked away with a potentially larger compensation package approved by shareholders.

“He does what he wants and sometimes gets a slap on the wrist, so why would he change?” Lund said.

Then there is the personality. Shubha Ghosh, a law professor at Syracuse University, described Musk as having “a larger than life personality” that separates him from the typical business executive in ways that go beyond the financial. The OpenAI trial is a case in point, Musk appeared to choose the height of that high-profile legal battle as the moment to move SpaceX toward a public listing, a decision that baffled conventional business logic. Companies preparing to go public typically observe a strict “quiet period” mandated by the SEC, during which executives say as little as possible to avoid running afoul of rules governing public statements. Musk, characteristically, did the opposite.

“He is not afraid of public opinion, he’s not afraid of taking big swings,” Lund said, noting that the kind of risk tolerance Musk displays can be a genuine asset in entrepreneurship. The courtroom, however, is a different arena, and repeated losses there have not dulled his appetite for it.

Ghosh stopped short of condemning Musk’s approach outright. “In a lot of ways, he is just another businessperson asserting his rights,” he said. “I don’t think he’s abusing the legal system. Whether he uses it effectively, I’m not sure.”

The effectiveness question is a real one. A string of high-profile losses would, for most executives, prompt a serious reassessment of legal strategy, if not out of principle, then out of the reputational and financial cost of being seen to lose repeatedly and publicly. For Musk, neither the reputational nor the financial calculus seems to apply in the normal way.

Lund reached for a comparison that she acknowledged was imperfect but telling: Donald Trump, a president notorious for filing lawsuits against perceived enemies and making inflammatory public statements with apparent indifference to consequence.

“Musk is a singular individual,” she said, “but negative things never seem to stick to either of them.”

Even Carl Icahn, the corporate raider whose aggressive dealmaking tactics inspired the fictional Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, does not quite match the particular brand of brazenness Musk has put on display, according to Lund.

“No one is invincible,” Ghosh noted carefully.

But invincibility, it turns out, may not be the point. For Musk, the pattern suggests that fighting, regardless of outcome, is the goal in itself. Whether that changes, and what it would take to change it, remains an open question.

“If and when this will blow up for him, I don’t know,” Lund said.

Source: BBC

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