OPENAI ACCUSES MUSK OF 'AMBUSH' AS $100 BILLION-PLUS TRIAL LOOMS
(Bloomberg) -- OpenAI says Elon Musk has suddenly changed direction on what he’s seeking in his lawsuit against the startup in a “legal ambush” just weeks before trial.
In a court filing late Friday night, OpenAI said the objectives Musk proposed earlier in the week appear to be aimed at “sandbagging the defendants and injecting chaos into the proceedings, while trying to recast his public narrative about his lawsuit.”
Musk sued OpenAI and Microsoft Corp. in 2024 over claims that the maker of ChatGPT abandoned its founding mission as a research institution when it took billions of dollars in backing from the software stalwart and planned its restructuring as a for-profit business. A trial over those allegations is set for April 27. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied wrongdoing.
The world’s richest person told the court in January he was seeking in the range of $79 billion to $134 billion in “wrongful gains” from his adversaries, based in large part on how much the value of OpenAI has exploded since Musk worked with Sam Altman and others to found the startup in 2015. A judgment of that magnitude would be among the largest court awards in US history.
Then Musk’s lawyers said in a filing this week that any money he wins at trial should go back to OpenAI instead of to him. They also said Musk wants the court to unwind OpenAI’s conversion and to oversee its financings and transactions in the future ensure it doesn’t stray from its original mission — and for Altman to be ousted from his leadership roles as OpenAI’s chief executive officer and board member.
OpenAI said in Friday’s filing that these 11th-hour proposals are “legally improper and factually unsupported.”
“Musk’s proposed amendment would require the presentation of different evidence and different witnesses than the case he sponsored until three days ago,” OpenAI’s lawyers wrote.
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2026-04-11T05:36:34Z
