Musk wants the court to slow OpenAI’s roll

He wants a crackdown on OpenAI allegedly telling its investors to boycott investing in other AI startups.

12/3/24 3:16PM

Another bit of Elon news: on Friday, he filed a preliminary injunction against OpenAI in federal court to stop the $157 billion startup from converting into a fully for-profit business. For context, Musk, who cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 and left the company after a disagreement with its other cofounders over the company’s direction, already sued OpenAI twice in the last year, first in a San Francisco court in March, before dropping that lawsuit and refiling a new suit in federal court in August.

In the previous suits, Musk alleged that he was “courted and deceived” by Sam Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman to cofound a nonprofit while Altman always intended to build out a for-profit company under the surface. Musk, whose AI startup xAI is a competitor to OpenAI, has said in his latest injunction that OpenAI led a group boycott of investment capital blocking its current investors from investing in xAI, and that the company should be blocked from “benefitting from wrongfully obtained competitively sensitive information or coordination via the Microsoft-OpenAI board interlocks.”

Basically, Musk doesn’t want OpenAI to convert to a for-profit model, as it goes against the company’s charter, and he wants to prevent OpenAI from allegedly requiring investors to not invest in its competitors. Of course, he has 50 billion reasons to want to slow down OpenAI, given xAI’s recent fundraise, but it is interesting to see the CEO of the world’s most valuable auto company and one of its highest-profile AI companies playing defense in the court with one company, while he’s full-court pressing with the other.

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Shares of eBay fell as much as 10.5% in premarket trading on Thursday morning after the company gave a lower-than-expected profit forecast for the important holiday shopping season.

The e-commerce giant reported solid numbers for the third quarter on Wednesday, with revenue up 9% as reported to $2.8 billion and gross merchandise volume rising 10% to $20.1 billion, topping the average analyst forecast of $19.4 billion, per Bloomberg.

However, concerns about the future somewhat overshadowed these results.

eBay outlined its profit outlook for the period ending in December to $1.31 to $1.36 a share, with revenue at $2.83 billion to $2.89 billion. According to Bloomberg-compiled data, this broadly matches Wall Street’s estimates for the top line, but misses on the bottom line, with analysts forecasting EPS to come in at $1.39 — suggesting the company expects some further margin pressure.

The company has been facing macroeconomic challenges since the US ended the de minimis tariff exemption in late August, with the online marketplace reliant on shipments. One small silver lining? CFO Peggy Alford highlighted a “less durable trend” on a post-earnings call: that as commodity prices for precious metals boomed, demand for bullion and collectible coins on eBay spiked.