Elon Musk and Sam Altman's fight just got personal on Wall Street

There’s a particular kind of rivalry that only exists in Silicon Valley, where two co-founders who once shared a vision spend the next decade trying to prove the other wrong.

It rarely ends in handshakes. It usually ends in lawsuits, broken friendships, and competing companies built specifically to make the other look bad.

The Elon Musk and Sam Altman split has all three.

They launched OpenAI together in 2015 with a pledge to develop artificial intelligence as a nonprofit “for the benefit of humanity.” Musk put up some of the early funding, then left the board in 2018 after a power struggle. He launched the competing AI lab xAI in 2023.

In 2024, he sued Altman, accusing him of abandoning that founding nonprofit mission for personal gain. He asked the court to rescind OpenAI’s for-profit restructuring and remove Altman and president Greg Brockman from their roles.

On May 18, a federal jury in Oakland threw the case out. Almost immediately, the fight moved to a new arena, one where everyday investors are about to be asked to pick a side.

What the Musk-Altman courtroom verdict actually decided

The advisory jury sided with Altman after less than two hours of deliberations, with District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers adopting the decision immediately. Jurors never weighed whether Musk’s “breach of charitable trust” claim had merit. They concluded he waited too long to file, missing a three-year window, according to CNBC.

Musk, true to form, was unrepentant. The Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX chief executive called the ruling a “calendar technicality” on his X platform and accused Altman and Brockman of “stealing a charity.” He has vowed to appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

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OpenAI’s legal team argued through the trial that Musk’s donations to the nonprofit were never restricted, and that restructuring into a for-profit subsidiary was the only realistic way to compete in a field where training one frontier model costs tens of billions of dollars. They also produced evidence that Musk pushed in 2017 to fold OpenAI into Tesla under his own control before walking away.

That framing, whatever you make of it, sets up everything that happens next. Because the courtroom was always a sideshow. The main event is on Wall Street.

Musk accuses Altman and Brockman of “stealing a charity.”

Photo by Alex Wong on Getty Images

Why the SpaceX and OpenAI IPO race is the real fight

SpaceX, which absorbed Musk’s xAI in February’s $1.25 trillion mega-merger, is preparing to disclose its initial public offering prospectus as soon as this week. The company targets a $1.75 trillion valuation and a $75 billion raise, Fortune reports. That would make it the largest IPO ever, more than two-and-a-half times the size of Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record.

OpenAI’s path is messier. The company was last valued at more than $850 billion, and Altman wants to go public as early as the fourth quarter, CNBC noted. His chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has reportedly told colleagues she would rather wait until 2027.

Related: Sam Altman’s bold new deal puts Malta ahead of U.S. citizens

The reason is math. OpenAI has accumulated roughly $600 billion in compute commitments against about $2 billion a month in revenue, according to Notebook Check. I ran those numbers myself. Even if OpenAI hits its current monthly run rate every month for five straight years, the revenue side comes out to about $120 billion. The compute bill alone is roughly five times that.

Aswath Damodaran, the New York University finance professor known on Wall Street as the “Dean of Valuation,” has his own warning. SpaceX pricing “is always going to be messy here,” he told Reuters. “Nobody else has that capacity to launch satellites in numbers and at the price that they can do, that’s their big advantage.”

His own model values SpaceX at $1.22 trillion, about 30% below the $1.75 trillion the company is reportedly chasing.

What two competing AI IPOs mean for your portfolio

Here’s where my analysis lands after a month of watching this play out. The Musk Altman fight is not really about who was right in 2015 or who told the truth on the stand. It’s about who controls the next decade of AI infrastructure, and the public market is now the referee.

If you’re a retail investor, the calendar matters more than the courtroom drama. SpaceX has reserved up to 30% of its float for retail buyers, “approximately three times the standard allocation for an offering of this size,” reported TechTimes. OpenAI’s IPO mechanics are still unknown, but expect a similar retail pitch when it lands.

Here’s the short version of where this stands today.

Feb. 3, 2026: SpaceX absorbed xAI in a $1.25 trillion merger, the largest ever, CNBC confirmedApril 1, 2026: SpaceX confidentially filed its S-1 paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Reuters reportedApril 28, 2026: Musk v. OpenAI trial opened in Oakland, according to MIT Technology ReviewMay 18, 2026: A jury rejected Musk’s lawsuit on statute of limitations grounds, CNBC noted.June 12, 2026 (target): SpaceX expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq as “SPCX”Q4 2026 (Altman’s target): OpenAI’s earliest possible IPO window

Damodaran offered the other framing Tesla shareholders learned the hard way. “You get the package. You get the Musk package, the good stuff, the bad stuff,” he told Benzinga.

SpaceX is listing under a dual-class structure that hands Musk 10 votes per share against one vote for outside investors, letting him control roughly 80% of the voting power on about 42% of the equity.

The bigger threat to OpenAI was never the lawsuit anyway. It’s Anthropic, which has quietly taken share in enterprise AI and the coding market, even while the trial dominated the headlines. Polymarket’s contract for an OpenAI IPO by Dec. 31 is still pricing “No” at 74%, Benzinga indicated, which tells you traders had already priced in a Musk loss and concluded the courtroom verdict was beside the point.

If both deals price this year, retail investors will be choosing between two visions of AI’s future run by two men who cannot stand to be in the same room. That choice now happens on a brokerage screen, not in front of a jury. And that is a very different kind of fight to win.

Related: Jim Cramer has a surprising take on Elon Musk’s OpenAI loss

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