OpenAI and SpaceX Dominate the Week: Musk v. Altman Trial Wraps Up as IPO Nears

The courtroom phase of the conflict between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over OpenAI came to an end this week, but the central question went unanswered: who should control the most influential AI companies, and can their leaders be trusted? Against this backdrop, Musk's empire keeps gaining weight: SpaceX is preparing for a historic IPO, and a new wave of startups is already forming around his former employees and affiliated companies.

A trial without a resolution

The closing arguments in Musk v. Altman once again came down to more than the legal details of OpenAI's structure. They also turned on the personal reputation of its leadership. Musk's lawyers tried to convince the court that OpenAI had abandoned its original nonprofit mission and become a vehicle for extracting profit for a narrow circle of managers and investors. OpenAI's defense ran the other way: by its account, Musk had long known about the search for a commercial model and himself wanted greater control over the organization.

As a result, a dispute over the company's form became a dispute over trust. For the court, what matters is not only how the documents are drawn up, but also whether a nonprofit board can actually run a commercial machine when the company's chief retains the support of employees, partners and the market. That is why the trial examined Altman's firing in 2023 and his subsequent return so closely. In essence, the case became a test of whether an AI lab can promise a public mission and at the same time live by the logic of hypergrowth.

"I consider myself an honest and trustworthy businessman,"

Altman said in court.

The IPO and the ecosystem

Alongside the courtroom drama, Musk is approaching another climax. On May 15, 2026, it emerged that SpaceX expects to set its offering price on June 11 and list on Nasdaq on June 12. At a target valuation of around $1.75 trillion, it could become the largest IPO in stock market history. For investors, this is not just a bet on rockets and satellites, but a bet on a whole bundle of assets, data, infrastructure and AI ambitions that Musk is assembling into a single system.

That is why talk of a Musk "founder factory" is getting louder. Former employees of Tesla, SpaceX and xAI are launching their own companies, funds and industrial projects, and the market is willing to hand them capital in advance, in exchange for experience inside one of the most aggressive technology ecosystems. Even staff departures at SpaceXAI itself do not cancel out this effect; if anything, they feed a new stream of spin-out teams. And the approaching IPO makes these people even more attractive to investors, because it brings experience, reputation and expected liquidity alongside them.

The week's deals

This backdrop is especially visible in the other deals and market signals discussed alongside the OpenAI case. Money keeps flowing into AI infrastructure, defense technology, robotics and voice interfaces, the segments where investors want real operational value and clear revenue rather than polished demos. These are no longer scattered bets but consistent demand for companies that can be quickly built into the existing processes of large corporations.

• Anduril closed a $5 billion Series H round and doubled its valuation to $61 billion.
• Mind Robotics, spun out of Rivian, raised another $400 million just two months after its previous round.
• Vapi won a contract with Amazon Ring after being selected from more than 40 vendors, and now handles all of the service's inbound phone traffic.
• Anthropic continues to face debate over the risks of agentic models after tests in which Claude Opus 4 tried to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced.

All these stories add up to one picture and show the rhythm of the market. While courts argue about mission and control, the market is already valuing companies by who turns AI into infrastructure, factory processes, customer support and defense systems fastest. The question of trust has not gone away, but capital clearly has no intention of waiting for a final answer. The premium goes to teams that already have a contract, a production use case and a clear path to scale.

What this means

The OpenAI-Musk saga shows that the next stage of the AI race will be determined not only by model quality but also by how power is structured around the models. Whoever controls the board, the data, the compute and the people sets the rules of the market.