Polymarket Degens Short Elon's OpenAI Court Crusade: 68% See It as a Legal Shitcoin

The degens over at Polymarket have spoken, and they're not exactly YOLO-ing into Elon's legal moonshot. The prediction market currently shows a paltry 31% buying the 'yes' side on Musk winning his OpenAI lawsuit, while a crushing 68.2% majority are betting 'no'—a clearer signal than a rug pull's dead wallet.

Not one to miss a PR spin cycle, Musk took to X with a classic "for the children" play, stating, "By the way, the proceeds of any legal victory in the OpenAI case will be donated to charity. I will in no way enrich myself." His claimed damages, a figure so astronomical it would make a memecoin founder blush, range from $79 billion to a staggering $134 billion, though the judge has already side-eyed the higher number harder than a suspicious airdrop.

The core of the lawsuit reads like a betrayed whitepaper: Musk alleges OpenAI rugged its original non-profit mission to build safe AGI "for the benefit of humanity" and instead did a hard fork into a for-profit partnership with Microsoft. Musk, who co-founded the project in 2015, seeded it with roughly $38 million and some early vision, before exiting the DAO, so to speak, in 2018.

OpenAI's rebuttal is the blockchain equivalent of "code is law," countering that Musk was fully aware of and agreed to for-profit plans by 2017. They claim negotiations broke down because Musk wanted majority control, and that he later suggested they raise billions independently. This leaves us with two completely forked narratives before a single byte of trial evidence has been submitted.

Adding another layer of complexity to this legal layer-2 saga, a separate xAI trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI was dismissed in February 2026. While not part of this current trial, it certainly adds some historical FUD to the ongoing feud.

The main event is scheduled for April 28 in California federal court. At a recent pre-trial hearing, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers was about as convinced by Musk's $134 billion damages claim as a crypto skeptic is by a "trust me bro" audit, remarking that a jury would likely see the expert "pulling these numbers out of the air."

Despite her palpable skepticism, the judge refused to dismiss the expert's testimony at this stage, noting that throwing it out would basically be a trial kill switch due to a lack of other damage evidence. She also highlighted the unique challenge of jury selection in a case featuring billionaires with more public baggage than a Celsius wallet, pondering how to vet potential jurors on their views of the ultra-wealthy.