Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and partner company Microsoft. As co-founder of the AI company, he feels cheated out of his share of its current success. His claim for damages amounts to up to three-digit billions. A commentary analysis.
Elon Musk files billion-dollar lawsuit against OpenAI
- Elon Musk is a co-founder of OpenAI, but left the company in 2018 due to internal disputes. Musk now claims that he was unlawfully deprived of his investment at the time $38 million been brought. An expert he consulted puts this at a current claim of $65.5 billion to $109.43 billion from OpenAI and $13.3 billion to $25.06 billion from Microsoft.
- The current lawsuit is Part of a larger conflict. In March 2025, a court dismissed an emergency motion by Elon Musk to stop OpenAI’s restructuring into a for-profit company. However, the judge decided to start a main trial, which is expected for April 2026. Musk has also sued Apple and OpenAI. The accusation: The two companies are working together, which puts Musk’s AI chatbot Grok at a disadvantage in the App Store.
- OpenAI accuses the Tesla boss of wanting to hinder the company with his legal actions in order to benefit himself To gain advantages in the AI competition. As a result of the dispute, hundreds of emails, documents and private entries have now become public. In a statement, OpenAI accuses Musk of cherry-picking. His lawsuit is said to take numerous quotes out of context.
Contradictory arguments from Musk
In the legal dispute between Elon Musk and OpenAI, money seems to play at best a minor role. Rather, Musk is waging a kind of private war against the ChatGPT developer, who… Turning point in the AI competition where ideological illusion meets strategic vision and commercial reality.
OpenAI’s original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity was about long since overtaken by the capital market. The conversion into an at least partially profit-oriented company is certainly open to criticism.
But Elon Musk, paradoxically, criticizes exactly this transformation on the one hand, but wants to benefit from it on the other. The documents also show that Musk wanted to make OpenAI itself profitable by creating a Merger with Tesla and thus sought more power.
The fact that he now runs an AI company, xAI, which has launched its own chatbot, Grok, leaves the lawsuit behind more like a strategic move appear.
Spicy: OpenAI does not deny that Elon Musk once invested several million US dollars. But the demand of the richest person in the world, with up to 2,900 times his original stake in a donation to a non-profit organization at the time, simply seems absurd.
Voices
- Elon Musk’s lawyer Steven Molo argues in the filed statement of claim, “Just as an early investor in a start-up can earn profits many times greater than his original investment, the ill-gotten gains that OpenAI and Microsoft made – and which Mr. Musk is now entitled to repay – are far greater than Mr. Musk’s original contributions.”
- OpenAI said in a statement to the Bloomberg news agency: “Musk’s lawsuit remains baseless and part of his ongoing harassment, and we look forward to proving this in court. This latest frivolous claim only serves to continue this campaign of harassment.”
- OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman in a post on
The cold war of chatbots
Elon Musk’s current lawsuit cannot be dismissed entirely out of hand. Because as a founding member and patron of OpenAI, he has contributed to some extent to the company’s current success. But: His argument is seriously flawed in terms of both content and finances.
Compensation for Musk is not ruled out, but the demands mentioned are both speculative and astronomical – but apparently deliberately staged that way. Because Elon Musk seems to be less concerned with the money than with lighting another fire in the AI competition.
At the same time, he could cold war of chatbots become noticeably hotter, as power and politics now apparently play a larger role than the AI technology itself. Another sticking point: lawsuits of this kind sometimes keep courts busy for years.
Instead of unnecessarily burdening the judiciary, Elon Musk would do well to start by banning right-wing populist and sexualized content from his own platforms. The fact that OpenAI is valued at up to $500 billion but is currently not making a profit could take further wind out of Musk’s sails.
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