Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is asking OpenAI and Microsoft to pay him US$134 billion (A$201 billion) in wrongful gains from his investments in OpenAI.
The Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Officer, whose net worth has been estimated at $750 billion, is making the claim in legal action he has launched against the two companies in a United States court.
In a court filing Musk cited a financial expert’s estimates of OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s gains from his “critical contributions” to OpenAI from the time he helped found the artificial intelligence (AI)-focussed research and technology company.
The contributions included the $38 million, or about 60% of the non-profit’s seed funding, in its early years, and non-monetary contributions such as recruitment, introducing contacts and teaching his co-founders about running a business.
The early contributions were critical to OpenAI’s ability to achieve the $500 billion valuation it reached over the last year, he claimed.
The expert calculated OpenAI’s gains as the product of the value of OpenAI’s for-profit entity, OpenAI non-profit’s share of the for-profit and the portion of the non-profit’s value attributable to Musk’s contributions, which he estimated at 50% to 75%.
This equated to wrongful gains of $65.50 billion to $109.43 billion for OpenAI and $13.30 billion to $25.06 billion for Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI.
"Without Elon Musk, there'd be no OpenAI. He provided the bulk of the seed funding, lent his reputation, and taught them all he knows about scaling a business. A pre-eminent expert quantified the value of that," Musk's lead trial lawyer Steven Molo was quoted as saying in a Reuters article.
OpenAI responded by saying in a statement that Musk’s lawsuit continued to be baseless and a part of an ongoing pattern of harassment, while Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
“This latest unserious demand is aimed solely at furthering this harassment campaign,” OpenAI said.
Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and runs xAI with its competitor chatbot Grok.
OpenAI also said: We're sad that it's come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him."
A judge has ruled that a jury will hear the trial, which is expected to start in April.
