Elon Musk Will Face Court For Harassing OpenAI

About ten years ago, Elon Musk was involved in the development of the OpenAI startup, but left it before the success of ChatGPT rapidly increased the company’s commercial potential. The current management of OpenAI believes that Musk is now trying to harm the company’s business in every way possible, while simultaneously promoting the interests of a competing startup, xAI. OpenAI will try to stop Musk through the courts.

Image source: Unsplash, Levart_Photographer

The corresponding lawsuit, as Bloomberg notes, was filed by OpenAI lawyers this week. In a document about 100 pages long, the plaintiff’s representatives describe how Elon Musk uses court proceedings and media publications to infringe on the interests of OpenAI. Even the February attempt to buy the startup for $97.4 billion was used by the entrepreneur to damage his business, according to the lawyers. By setting such a price bar, Musk thereby complicated OpenAI’s negotiations with real investors, who will now inevitably be guided by it and may, as a result, abandon their intentions to invest in the startup’s capital.

The main goal of such activity by Musk, as OpenAI representatives believe, is to create more favorable conditions for doing business for the startup xAI, which he founded in 2023. Recently, xAI nominally absorbed the social network X, which Musk acquired in 2022 for $44 billion. The combined structure is estimated by experts at least at $100 billion.

Last week, OpenAI raised $40 billion from Japanese corporation SoftBank, with which it is participating in the implementation of the Stargate project to develop the American national computing structure. This round of financing increases the capitalization of OpenAI to $300 billion, according to experts.

The OpenAI lawsuit also reports on Musk’s attempts to dissuade investors from supporting the company. Musk himself previously accused OpenAI of making its investors promise not to support competitors, but the startup’s representatives rejected such accusations. The court hearing on the fresh lawsuit will have to be considered with the participation of a jury, as OpenAI representatives insist. The parties will also have to meet in court in March next year on the lawsuit on OpenAI restructuring, in which the billionaire will try to prevent it. It is not yet known when the hearing on the case of Elon Musk’s persecution of OpenAI will take place.