New Delhi: Elon Musk has stepped up his legal fight against OpenAI and Microsoft, saying both companies made huge profits using work that began with his early
support and that he now deserves a share of that money. In a court filing submitted on friday January 16, Musk said he is asking for up to $134 billion in damages.
He claims this amount represents the “wrongful gains” made by OpenAI and Microsoft from his role in OpenAI’s early years, as reported by Reuters. Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015. In the filing, he argued that OpenAI benefited the most from his backing at the start and estimated that the ChatGPT maker gained between $65.5 billion and $109.4 billion because of his involvement.
What Elon Musk says through his lawyer
This action came one day after a federal judge rejected a request by OpenAI and Microsoft to avoid a jury trial. The trial is scheduled to take place in late April in Oakland, California.
Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, argued in the filing that the scale of the gains matters more than the size of Musk’s original contribution. He wrote, “Just as an early investor in a startup company may realise gains many orders of magnitude greater than the investor’s initial investment, the wrongful gains that OpenAI and Microsoft have earned and which Mr Musk is now entitled to disgorge are much larger than Mr Musk’s initial contributions.”
Sam Altman responds on this
The case has also led to a public response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman replied to Musk’s claims by sharing call notes that Musk has referred to in his court filings. In a post on X, Altman said Musk was selecting parts of conversations to make OpenAI president Greg Brockman look bad. He added that the wider context showed Musk himself was pushing for a different structure at OpenAI. According to Altman, Brockman and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever spent a lot of time trying to see if Musk’s demands could be met.
Altman shared more details in another post, recalling discussions he said were important to understanding the dispute. He wrote, “I remembered a lot of this, but here is a part I had forgotten: ‘Elon said he wanted to accumulate $80B for a self-sustaining city on Mars and that he needed and deserved majority equity.
He said that he needed full control since he’d been burned by not having it in the past, and when we discussed succession, he surprised us by talking about his children controlling AGI.
“I appreciate people saying what they want and think it enables people to resolve things (or not). But Elon saying he wants the above is important context for Greg trying to figure out what he wants ”.
