The CEO of SpaceX, Elon Muskis seeking up to $134 billion from OpenAI and from Microsoft. Musk claims he deserves the “improper gains” they received from their early support of the artificial intelligence startup, according to a court filing Friday.
OpenAI made between $65.5 billion and $109.4 billion from the billionaire entrepreneur’s contributions when he co-founded what was then a startup, starting in 2015, while Microsoft made between $13.3 billion and $25.1 billion, Musk said in a statement. document presented to the federal court before his trial against the two companies.
“Without Elon Musk, there would be no OpenAI. He provided most of the initial funding, lent his reputation, and taught everything he knows about scaling a business. A renowned expert quantified the value of this,” Steven Molo, Musk’s lead attorney in the lawsuit, said in a statement to Reuters.
In a statement, OpenAI called Musk’s demand “imposed without seriousness” and part of what it called its “harassment campaign” against OpenAI.
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment outside of business hours about the amount of compensation Musk is seeking.
Microsoft and OpenAI have also filed lawsuits.
During the week, OpenAI classified the process as “unfounded” and part of a “harassment” campaign by Musk. A lawyer for Microsoft said there is no evidence the company “aided and abetted” OpenAI.
The two companies disputed Musk’s damage claims in a separate lawsuit on Friday.
Musk, who left OpenAI in 2018 and runs xAI with its chatbot competitor Grok, alleges that OpenAI, operator of ChatGPT, violated its founding mission in a high-profile restructuring to become a for-profit entity.
A judge in Oakland, California, ruled this month that a jury will hear the trial, scheduled to begin in April.
The document presented by Musk states that he contributed around US$38 million, which corresponds to 60% of OpenAI’s initial funding, helped recruit employees, connected the founders with contacts and gave credibility to the project when it was created.
“Just as an initial investor in a startup can make gains many orders of magnitude greater than their initial investment, the ill-gotten gains that OpenAI and Microsoft made – and which Mr. Musk now has the right to repay – are much greater than Mr. Musk’s initial contributions,” argues Musk.
The document states that Musk’s contributions to OpenAI and Microsoft were calculated by his expert witness, financial economist C. Paul Wazzan.
Musk could seek punitive damages and other penalties, including a possible injunction, if the jury finds either company guilty, according to the document, without specifying what form that injunction could take.
In their own petition, OpenAI and Microsoft asked the judge to limit what Musk’s expert could present to jurors, arguing that his analysis should be excluded as “contrived,” “unverifiable” and “unprecedented” and seeking an “implausible” transfer of billions from a nonprofit to a former donor-turned-competitor.
The companies also contested Musk’s damage figures more broadly, claiming that the expert’s approach was unreliable and could mislead the jury.
(Reporting by Bipasha Dey in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Mike Scarcella in Washington and Abu Sultan in Bengaluru; editing by William Mallard, Kirsten Donovan, Barbara Lewis and Diane Craft)
