Judge denies Musk move to block OpenAI’s shift to a for-profit model
Constellation Research founder Ray Wang explains how the fight between Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman began on ‘Making Money.’
A California judge denied Elon Musk’s move to halt OpenAI’s efforts to convert it into a for-profit entity, saying in a ruling that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO hadn’t met “the high burden required for a preliminary injunction.”
The declaration from U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland comes after Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman last year, arguing that OpenAI’s founders first approached him to back a nonprofit focused on developing AI for humanity, but now want to make money, according to Reuters.
Rogers said in her ruling that she is gearing up to expedite a trial on the matter later this year.
“We look forward to a jury confirming that [OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman accepted Musk’s charitable contributions knowing full well they had to be used for the public’s benefit rather than his own enrichment,” Musk lawyer Marc Toberoff told Reuters.
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White House senior advisor to the President and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk salutes President Donald Trump as he addresses a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 along with Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others, split from the company in early 2018 after failing to secure control over the company as its majority shareholder and CEO and later attempting to convince its founders to merge it with Tesla. Musk founded xAI, a competitor to OpenAI, in March 2023.
In December 2024, Musk asked a court to stop OpenAI — the maker of ChatGPT — from transitioning into a for-profit entity, Reuters reported.
OPENAI HITS BACK AT ELON MUSK LAWSUIT, SAYS HE SUGGESTED FOR-PROFIT ENTITY
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, left, rejected a bid from SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to purchase his company. (Sean Gallup/Andrew Harnik/Getty Images / Getty Images)
“This has always been about competition,” OpenAI told The Associated Press in response to the judge’s ruling. “Elon’s own emails show that he wanted to merge a for-profit OpenAI into Tesla. That would have been great for his personal benefit, but not for our mission or U.S. interests.”
Musk submitted an unsolicited bid of $97.4 billion to take over OpenAI earlier this year.
OpenAI is the maker of ChatGPT. (Idrees Abbas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images / Getty Images)
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“I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor. He’s working hard to raise a lot of money for [his startup] xAI and they are trying to compete with us from a technological perspective from getting the product into the market,” Altman told Bloomberg at the time, adding that “I wish he would just compete by building a better product but I think there has been a lot of tactics, you know many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff and now this.”
FOX Business’ Eric Revell contributed to this report.
