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Last year, Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. This year, the xAI CEO was enlisting the Meta boss for help, according to a recent court filing. Musk approached Zuckerberg about helping xAI finance an attempted $97.4 billion takeover of OpenAI earlier this year, the filing said. Musk’s feud with Zuckerberg has spanned nearly a decade.
There’s apparently some truth to the saying, “The enemy of your enemy is your friend.”
Elon Musk approached Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year, asking him to help finance xAI’s bid to buy Sam Altman’s OpenAI, according to a court filing released Thursday. The call for help came after a long history of tension between the tech superstars.
After founding OpenAI with Altman in 2015, Musk has taken issue with OpenAI’s closed-source model and its push to become a for-profit entity. Thursday’s filing is part of an ongoing lawsuit Musk filed against OpenAI in federal court in Northern California in August 2024, alleging OpenAI breached its initial contract by favoring business interests over its initial commitment to benefiting humanity.
Musk doubled down on efforts that were interpreted as preventing OpenAI from rapid growth, making an unsolicited attempt to buy the company for $97.4 billion in February. Beyond the OpenAI board unanimously rejecting the offer, OpenAI called the effort a “sham bid” designed to impede the company’s funding efforts.
Earlier this month, a judge allowed OpenAI to move forward with counterclaims against Musk. On Thursday as part of the claims, OpenAI said in a statement to the court that Musk had approached Zuckerberg regarding a letter of intent “about potentially financial arrangements or investors” in a bid for a hostile takeover of OpenAI. Neither Meta nor Zuckerberg signed the letter of intent, according to the filing.
The filing also subpoenaed Meta to disclose documentation of correspondence with Musk or xAI regarding an intent to buy the startup.
Beyond feeling as though OpenAI had strayed from the mission he helped create for it, Musk had other reasons to want to best the company. He left the startup’s board in 2018, the year before Microsoft pumped $1 billion into the company. Months after Microsoft announced another $10 billion investment in OpenAI in 2023, Musk unveiled xAI as an alternative to ChatGPT.
“I don’t disagree necessarily with his viewpoint that the restructuring of OpenAI as a for profit company is probably not good for humanity,” Amelia Martella, adjunct professor and executive director of Fordham University’s Corporate Law Center, told Fortune. “At the same time, he is probably looking to control all of the successful AI companies. So there’s a mixed motive for sure.”
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