Elon Musk Just Lost His OpenAI Lawsuit And It Might Change The Tech World Forever

Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI has been overturned by a jury that says he waited too long to bring his grievance to trial.

…Couldn’t they have said that from the start? Or were they also waiting just to prove a point?

Musk was fighting OpenAI’s transition into a for-profit company following his ousting in 2018. But during the trial, OpenAI’s current CEO, Sam Altman, alleged that Elon was for the idea.

“A particularly hair-raising moment was when my co-founders asked, ‘If you have control, what happens when you die?’” Altman explained. Elon then “said something like, ‘maybe it should pass to my children.’”

Well, now nothing’s passing to anyone anyway, as all of that (and the three weeks of testimonials) was apparently hypothetical because the case has been thrown out on a “calendar technicality” (as Elon describes it).

Elon says he plans to fight the case on appeal, but after a judge and jury have sided against him, it’s unlikely that he’d win a rematch.

An Open(AI) And Shut Case

So what does this mean for the wider tech world?

Well, the ruling means OpenAI won’t have any more roadblocks in its transition into a fully for-profit company, enabling it to keep its place as a flagship AI company.

Sorry, Grok.

Had the lawsuit been successful, however, it would be a very different story. Altmans’ OpenAI might easily have been hangstrung with a purely not-for-profit remit and be forced to step out of the AI spotlight.

That vacuum could have then left room for companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, or Google to take on its market share.

So the impact of this lawsuit is less about what’s happened and more about the scenario that’s been prevented from happening: OpenAI won’t revert to nonprofit status, ChatGPT can continue in its push towards profitability, and Elon likely won’t regain the reins any time soon.

But in an alternate universe where Elon won, the tech world would have been changed forever. Would XAI, sorry, SpaceXAI, have taken the place of OpenAI is this crazy future? Well, I guess thanks to this court case, we’ll never know.

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