Musk\u2019s lawyers claim that his contributions include not just the $38 million in seed funding he provided during OpenAI\u2019s early years, but also recruiting early employees, providing business contacts, and lending his ‘prestige and reputation’ to the venture.<\/b>
\nFollowing years of legal disputes between Elon Musk and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, the Tesla CEO is now seeking up to $134 billion from OpenAI and its largest investor, Microsoft.
In the newest court filing, Musk\u2019s lawyers allege that OpenAI gained between $65.5 billion and $109.4 billion as a result of his contributions to the company. Microsoft allegedly gained between $13.3 billion and $25.1 billion.
Musk\u2019s lawyers claim that his contributions include not just the $38 million in seed funding he provided during OpenAI\u2019s early years\u2014roughly 60% of the nonprofit\u2019s seed funding\u2014but also his nonmonetary contributions. These include recruiting early employees, providing business contacts, and lending his \u201cprestige and reputation\u201d to the venture.
OpenAI has been quick to clap back at Musk\u2019s claims. In an official blog post, the company accuses Musk of cherry-picking and publishes snippets from private journal entries written by OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, without appropriate context.
\u201cElon\u2019s latest variant of this lawsuit is his fourth attempt at these particular claims, and part of a broader strategy of harassment aimed at slowing us down and advantaging his own AI company, xAI,\u201d the blog post reads.
OpenAI accuses Musk of \u201cgrossly misrepresenting the written record to further his harassment.\u201d The company claims that Musk said he wanted to accumulate $80 billion for a self-sustaining city on Mars during earlier conversations, and that \u201che needed and deserved majority equity.\u201d
He allegedly also talked about \u201chis children controlling Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).\u201d This refers to a hypothetical type of AI that would surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks, rather than merely solving narrow tasks like current models.
Musk first sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in March 2024, claiming the company had committed a breach of contract because OpenAI strayed from its founding mission as a nonprofit. Though the original lawsuit was dropped, Musk later launched another lawsuit alleging wire fraud and numerous other crimes. His legal team later filed an injunction to stop it from transitioning into a for-profit company, followed by a takeover bid involving a consortium of investors in early 2025 (which was unanimously rejected by the board).<\/p>\n