Sam Altman v. Elon Musk v. Delaware

Elon Musk is mad at Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI. Musk has many grievances with the nonprofit research lab, some of which he has brought up repeatedly on podcasts, during television interviews and in social media posts. Among them: Musk thinks ChatGPT, the company’s AI chatbot, is insufficiently conservative (“WokeGPT,” he likes to call it), worries it might somehow lead to the end of the world if the chatbots get out of control and seems to be very frustrated about receiving insufficient credit for OpenAI’s achievements. (“I am the reason OpenAI exists,” he claimed on CNBC last year.)

None of these are necessarily grounds for a legal complaint, which may be why the lawsuit he filed against OpenAI last week focuses on a related, but somewhat different grievance: Musk says he donated money to what he thought was a philanthropic research lab, only to discover it was Silicon Valley’s hottest startup, with an $86 billion valuation and ambitions for a whole lot more.

To analyze the suit, and the feud between two of tech’s most powerful figures, Elon, Inc. called in Bloomberg’s official Elon Musk correspondent, Dana Hull, along with Bloomberg’s  unofficial one, Money Stuff author Matt Levine. We are also joined by tech reporter Shirin Ghaffary (and author of the Q&AI; newsletter) for a discussion about the merits (or lack thereof) of Musk’s argument and the competitive state of play. We also cover Musk’s fight over pay in Delaware and the new (new?) Tesla Roadster. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.