Elon Musk seeks ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as part of lawsuit

Elon Musk wants OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman to be removed from their positions as officers at the company, as part of a lawsuit that is expected to go to trial at the end of this month.

One legal recourse Musk’s lawyers on Tuesday outlined specific remedies their client is seeking if a judge and jury find that Altman and OpenAI defrauded Musk, the world’s richest person.

Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in 2024, claiming that the artificial intelligence company he helped found almost a decade ago “meticulously manipulated” and “tricked” him into donating $38 million based on promises that the organization would remain a nonprofit. Since then, the two sides have been embroiled in a public war of words, along with legal battles and a burgeoning business rivalry.

“Plaintiff will seek an order removing Altman from the OpenAI nonprofit board as a director and removing both Altman and Brockman as OpenAI nonprofit officers,” Musk’s attorneys said in Tuesday’s filing. “Removal of a charity’s officers and directors is a common resolution where those individuals fail to protect or fulfill the charity’s public mission.”

Musk is also asking the court to return OpenAI to operating as a bona fide nonprofit, according to the filing. The company completed restructuring in October and is now run as a nonprofit with a 26% stake in its for-profit arm, which includes ChatGPT.

Jury selection in the case is scheduled to begin April 27 in a federal court in Oakland, California. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Musk, Altman and others founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit artificial intelligence laboratory. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after trying to persuade executives there to merge it with electric vehicle company Tesla.

In 2023, Musk founded a rival company called xAI, which developed the AI ​​image generator and chatbot Grok. In February, Musk’s SpaceX acquired xAI, which also owns X (formerly Twitter), in a deal that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. SpaceX recently filed confidential documents with the SEC for what is likely to be a record IPO.

On Monday, OpenAI sent a letter to the attorneys general of California and Delaware urging them to investigate “improper and anticompetitive conduct” by Musk and his associates ahead of the hearing. In the letter, OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon claimed that Musk was trying to undermine OpenAI through various “attacks” on the company, including “coordinating efforts” with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Musk’s lawyers previously stated in a filing in January that their client should receive up to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and the leading investor. MicrosoftHe described the “false profits” that companies received as a result of his early work with OpenAI and its financial support.

In Tuesday’s filing, Musk’s lawyers said their client is seeking to “return all ill-gotten gains, including Microsoft’s, to the OpenAI charity.”

— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.

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