Elon Musk just lost another lawsuit. Will he keep fighting?

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has not been winning in court lately. His loss on Monday in his lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman is the latest in a string of legal defeats or settlements. Late last year he agreed to settle with former Twitter executives and thousands of former employees of the social platform, which he has renamed X, after fighting for years to pay them nothing.

Then in March, he lost a case brought against him by investors of Twitter, who claimed they were misled by public statements he made during the takeover. In May, another judge reversed certain actions by DOGE , the government cost-cutting department Musk helped create and led last year, finding cuts to some grants were "a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination." Now that he's also lost his high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI, is it possible that Musk will be less prone to picking fights? "No one is invincible," said Shubha Ghosh, a lawyer and law professor at Syracuse University. But it may take more significant losses for Musk to back off, or change his aggressive style , in the courts. "In a lot of ways, he is just another businessperson asserting his rights," Ghosh said. "I don't think he's abusing the legal system. Whether he uses it effectively, I'm not sure." In addition to a tendency towards the unconventional , Musk also has, literally, the deepest pockets on earth. He is poised to soon be the world's first trillionaire given his stake in SpaceX, another of his companies that is expected to be publicly listed in the near future. The sheer size of Musk's wealth makes it seem unlikely that even a string of losses, related costs or fines would put him off fighting or filing future lawsuits. "I don't see him stopping," said Dorothy Lund, a lawyer and 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." A recent fine of $1.5m (£1.1m) from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over his failure to disclose his initial accumulation of Twitter stock, for instance, is insignificant for someone like Musk. "He does what he wants and sometimes gets a slap on the wrist, so why would he change?" Lund said.

Key points

• Then in March, he lost a case brought against him by investors of Twitter, who claimed they were misled by public statements he made during the takeover.
• In May, another judge reversed certain actions by DOGE , the government cost-cutting department Musk helped create and led last year, finding cuts to some grants were "a textbook example of unconst…
• "No one is invincible," said Shubha Ghosh, a lawyer and law professor at Syracuse University.
• But it may take more significant losses for Musk to back off, or change his aggressive style , in the courts.
• "In a lot of ways, he is just another businessperson asserting his rights," Ghosh said.