Elon Rage Quits His Silly OpenAI Lawsuit

Legal Issues

from the can't-lose-a-lawsuit-that-no-longer-exists dept

Maybe the real artificial intelligence was the baseless lawsuits we filed along the way.

In March, we wrote about Elon’s patently ridiculous lawsuit filed against OpenAI, claiming a contract violation of a contract that didn’t actually exist. The whole thing was silly. Elon was mad about the ways in which OpenAI had changed since the time he had helped co-create it (and provide it with much of its initial funding). And, no matter how much people might agree that OpenAI has changed a lot in terms of its focus and mission, the fundamental problem was that no actual contract existed between Elon and OpenAI.

Instead, what Elon laid out were some emails between himself, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman, none of which amounted to a contract. He also pointed to the Certificate of Incorporation… which is also not a contract. And certainly not a document of which he was a party to.

Today, the court was set to hold a hearing on OpenAI’s motion to dismiss. Yesterday, Elon pulled a “you can’t fire me, I quit!” move by just dropping the lawsuit. Most of the news coverage of this did not (of course) provide the actual dismissal document, so we’ve linked to it here in this paragraph and embedded it below.

There’s not much to it, other than that it’s very clearly Musk dropping the lawsuit, not the two parties agreeing to end the case through some sort of settlement (in which case it would have been mutually filed and would have requested dismissal with prejudice to foreclose a follow-up lawsuit).

Like so many of Musk’s lawsuits, this one really appears to have been entirely for show and to rile up his sycophantic fanboys. It’s the same reason he threw a very silly temper tantrum earlier this week about Apple’s partnership with OpenAI.

Given that Musk is building a competitor to OpenAI, called xAI, it seems pretty transparently obvious that all of this is for show, and to rage petulantly at the competition. He knows he has no legitimate legal claim. He knows that Apple isn’t somehow doing anything particularly nefarious in its deal with OpenAI.

But he thrives on unthinking, gullible people assuming, falsely, that Musk alone is out there fighting the good fight against tech that he doesn’t like. Musk needs to be the centerpiece of any story about tech these days, and when that’s not true, he finds a way to insert himself into it.

In this case, he was on the verge of losing this case in a very embarrassing fashion, given the lack of anything even resembling a contract to breach in a breach of contract case. Rather than go through that humiliation, he just decided to cut bait and run.

Filed Under: ai, breach of contract, contract, elon musk
Companies: openai, twitter, x, xai