Over the past few years, Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has made damning allegations about OpenAI and filed multiple lawsuits against the company, citing a stark betrayal of its founding mission and involvement in racketeering activities.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, ruled that Musk will get his day in court over OpenAI's for-profit restructure and "ill-gotten gains," which is slated to commence in April and could last up to four weeks.
OpenAI recently published a critical blog post, accusing Elon Musk of misrepresenting the truth by selectively sharing snippets of past conversations that portrayed him favorably against the ChatGPT maker.
The company referred to Musk's lawsuit as part of a broader strategy of harassment designed to slow down its AI development and advances, giving his own company, xAI, the competitive edge and advantage. "He is now grossly misrepresenting the written record to further his harassment," OpenAI added.
In the blog post titled "The Truth Elon Left Out," OpenAI shared several instances where Musk cherry-picks and publishes snippets, which, when read in context, tell a very different story.
OpenAI indicated that they had reached an agreement with Elon Musk that a for-profit structure would be the next phase for OpenAI in 2017. However, the negotiations hit a wall when OpenAI refused to give Musk full control of the company.
According to OpenAI:
"The truth is that we and Elon agreed in 2017 that a for-profit structure would be the next phase for OpenAI; negotiations ended when we refused to give him full control; we rejected his offer to merge OpenAI into Tesla; we tried to find another path to achieve the mission together; and then he quit OpenAI, encouraging us to find our own path to raising billions of dollars, without which he gave us a 0% chance of success."
Musk revealed that he was reluctant to invest in the company without full control "since he'd been burned by not having it in the past." Perhaps more interestingly, OpenAI revealed that it was surprised when Elon Musk suggested that his kids would control AGI (artificial general intelligence) during succession discussions.
Elon Musk is suing key figures in OpenAI's leadership, including CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman. The billionaire alleges that the AI research lab used a fake humanitarian mission to dupe him into investing $38 million, only to shift away from its mission and evolve into a for-profit venture in October 2025.
In one of the entries shared by OpenAI, Brockman indicated that:
can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight. i’m just thinking about the office and we’re in the office. and his story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for-profit, just without him.
"Btw another realization from this is that it’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him," Brockman added. "To convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt. and he’s really not an idiot."
As the legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI intensifies, the AI firm has recently announced that it is introducing ads to ChatGPT. The change will impact free and Go users, with the ads appearing at the bottom of the chat. This could be part of the company's strategy to generate more revenue for its sophisticated AI advances and potentially address some of its financial woes.
Does Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI have merit, or is he simply trying to advance his xAI agenda? Share your thoughts in the comments and cast your vote in the poll!
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