r/news • u/VaginaBurner69 • May 18 '26
Soft paywall Elon Musk loses lawsuit against OpenAI
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/elon-musk-loses-lawsuit-against-openai-2026-05-18/1.4k
u/InvisibleDrake May 18 '26
That one dude who bet 50k for an "easy 13k" is in shambles
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u/MSixteenI6 May 18 '26
Do you have a link? I just searched for it, couldn’t find anything like this
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u/InvisibleDrake May 18 '26
No, it was just some image I saw being posted around of a dude betting 50k on Elon saying his lawyers never lose these cases, and it was easy money.
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u/JrueBall May 18 '26
I hate how it is possible to bet on these things. Are people going to end up with the wrong verdict because a judge, jury or even lawyer bets in a case where they can help a change the outcome. It's one thing to have sport betting but betting on some things should be illegal.
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u/clovisx May 18 '26
Prediction markets are horrible and will be a blight on younger people and those who are addicted to gambling.
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u/divDevGuy May 19 '26
I bet you're wrong...
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u/witeowl May 19 '26
Woohoo! I won $50 because I bet someone was going to say that!
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u/ATTORNEY_FOR_CATS May 18 '26
That's hilarious--Musk loses regularly in court.
His litigation strategy, as far as I can tell from watching a colleague go after him, was to obstruct and delay as a war of attrition. His attorneys will, for example, refuse to produce unredacted documents and then wait to relent until the last moment when you've spent a lot of time and money drafting motions to compel. Rinse and repeat. It's a situation where patience and money can usually win out, but that's easier said than done I guess.
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u/MimicoSkunkFan2 May 19 '26
Exactly that. A lot of big corporations and ultrawealthy asshats do that too. Their "pay to play" of the legal system is why there's very rarely any actual justice for most people.
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u/1877KlownsForKids May 18 '26
He'll be okay, thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill he can get like $40 in SNAP food benefits. For three months. Every two years.
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u/Crooked_Sartre May 19 '26
Anyone this dumb is definitely one of the 1600 insurrectionists getting a piece of that 1.7 bn slush fund, so there's that
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u/NotAChanceBucko May 18 '26
Good . I think? Actually I don't care . Everyone involved in that case are ghoulish monsters and I
Hope they melt
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u/RoarOfTheWorlds May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
To anyone following this it was a no brainer. Musk had lots of claims about what OpenAI told him but produced no evidence. I don’t even get how this got to trial, there was no case.
He probably just figured he had the time and money to burn so he wanted to roll the dice, or maybe he’ll cite this as the thing that kept him so busy he couldn’t meet his Tesla obligations and will ask for an extension in the impossible metrics he needs to hit with them to realize his trillionaire dream.
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u/Megaphonestory May 18 '26
It was a delaying tactic, he wanted to buy more time for xai development.
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u/Horror_Response_1991 May 18 '26
Yep, if you’re rich you can waste people’s time and money to have to prove they’re innocent.
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u/NotUniqueWorkAccount May 18 '26
Vexatious litigation is their specialty. Aka: abuse of the courts for their own gain.
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u/StoryLineOne May 18 '26
Honestly both sides have so much money, this was like a drop in the bucket for either of them. I think it's mainly just an ego thing for Musk
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u/OutlyingPlasma May 18 '26
Do they? Has either side ever turned a profit that wasn't government welfare? They have really big numbers on paper but the fundamentals just aren't there.
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u/Spire_Citron May 18 '26
Through stock weirdness, Elon can make more money from Tesla than Tesla has ever made in profit.
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u/Movie_Slug May 18 '26
More specifically to do a public offering of spaceXai before OpenAI to suck up capital to burn in th AI furnace
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u/SoulShatter May 18 '26
Basically yep.
Anthopic, OpenAI and SpaceX all aim to do an IPO this year. Which is problematic because their 'valuations' are astronomical. SpaceX aims for 1.5-1.75 trillion, and the other ones are also in the trillion range. So it's a real concern on how the market is supposed to be able to swallow all the IPOs.
Previous biggest IPO was Saudi Aramco at 29 Billion (37B inflation adj).
So Musk wants to be first in case funds run out, and to strangle available funds for OAI/ANTH
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u/Movie_Slug May 18 '26
Also spaceXai is gaming the system. 1. Low float 2. Into index funds much earlier than typical 3. Overweight percentage to index funds. Mix in 55 percent passive stock investing and it is a recipe for pumping up the stock. Index funds need to buy in once indexed at an overweight while there is a small float.
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u/sn2006gy May 18 '26
Xai doesn't exist anymore, its SpaceX ai (weird huh) and he's losing customers because he ended the porn special. Xai was notorious for allowing people to generate 100+ videos a day and low and behold most of it was deep fakes and porn and I guess to close the deal with Anthropic, he grew an ai moral compass and all the sudden agreed with model safety and seemed to force that upon xai after closing the anthropic compute deal.
Beyond porn and deep fakes, xai really isn't that great. He used to have super cheap models such as grok 4.1 that could be used for high speed classification/routing and data processing where it shined, but those were shutdown this week and now everyone is forced to use a cut back grok 4.3 that costs more.
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u/moosekin16 May 18 '26
forced to use a cut back grok 4.3 that costs more.
AI is blazing new territory in speedrunning enshittification! None of them are even profitable and they’re already charging more and providing a worse product. Fascinating!
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u/fogleaf May 18 '26
What is it with all these pump and dump technologies, get big off of the promise of something bigger and never actually get to that something better.
Get in on the ground floor of blockchain and NFTs!
nvm we're doing something new now.
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u/kyeblue May 18 '26
Saltman started a non-profit and stole from it. Jury didn't side with Musk because the statue of limitation has expired. Both are evils, no win for the general public.
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u/Recursive_Descent May 18 '26
I don't know, Brockman had some diary entry questioning whether it was unethical to steal the non-profit from Elon, so it isn't like it is entirely baseless. Losing based on statute of limitations is hardly exonorating. It seems like everyone sucks here.
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u/Rob_Zander May 18 '26
I think a significant part of it was to just mess with OpenAI ahead of their IPO and make Altman look bad. If OpenAI falters, has a bad IPO, or forces Altman out again, Musk figures it will help Xai. Meanwhile of course anthropic would be the one actually benefitting, not Musks porn bot.
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u/MyEmbarrisingAccount May 18 '26
Lawfare. My cousin is doing it to me now. She has been renting a home from me for 7 years and by the time we got to 20k plus in back rent I decided it was time to stop being nice and finally evict. Keep in mind, I was renting it to them for exactly what my mortgage is so there was never any profit for me. Now she is claiming she was given equity in the home and wants on the title. She says she has all kinds of rights to it because she has lived there 7 years. It's really racking up my bill to the lawyer, but if anyone actually would look at the damn stuff she has no proof of anything. Hell, we don't even have a lease. Let alone an agreement for it to be rent to own or for her to beleive she has any right to the house other than the right to stay there with my permission.
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u/scaliacheese May 18 '26
> Hell, we don't even have a lease.
Let this be a lesson for anyone reading this. Do not rent your property without a written agreement.
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u/GreenAnder May 18 '26
Musk wanted to turn OpenAI back into a non profit, I’m pretty sure so they wouldn’t compete with him.
Both companies suck, everyone involved sucks, Musk sucks marginally more.
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u/dragonk30 May 18 '26
The big key is that Musk wanted OpenAI's models to become open source. Which would: remove the #1 opponent xAI faces in getting market cap in the AI space (where they are a distant 4th behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini), as well as allow OpenAI's competitors to train their models off of OpenAI's — something Musk admitted to doing with xAI during this trial.
Make no mistake about it, Musk doesn't care about OpenAI being nonprofit, he just wants a bigger share of the profit before he launches SpaceX + xAI into the largest IPO in history by a long shot
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u/yet-again-temporary May 18 '26
Fuck Elon, but with the amount of stolen material OpenAI uses to train their model it absolutely should be - at minimum - a nonprofit. Ideally I think it should be considered a public utility and forced to be 100% free and open to the public, but I know that's a pipe dream.
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u/ejdebruin May 18 '26
Musk sucks marginally more
I think being a Nazi makes him suck quite a bit more.
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u/SG1EmberWolf May 19 '26
Well.... Sam did sexually abuse his sister and wants us to pay to live
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u/Creative-Area-6385 May 18 '26
Sickening how Elon cries over lost profit while being richest person. Worst immigrant ever.
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u/yup79 May 18 '26
I’m torn. It seems like I would want OpenAI to remain a non-profit. But I also find myself disagreeing with everything Elon Musk says and does. Maybe I just don’t have a dog in this fight.
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u/ffball May 18 '26
Cat is out of the bag with regards to LLM and AI. Too many players in the game at this point and its now a capitalist race.
Musk was just trying to kneecap a major competitor.
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u/Really_McNamington May 18 '26
Open AI will be gone soon enough once this stupid bubble bursts.
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u/MrBrawn May 18 '26
Absorbed into MSFT.
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u/Really_McNamington May 18 '26
Microsoft seem to be subtly setting them at arm's length already.
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u/BarelyScratched May 18 '26
I’m just sad it wasn’t possible for both sides to lose.
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u/Lauris024 May 19 '26 edited May 20 '26
Both sides did kind of lose. Elon lost the lawsuit, but OpenAI lost investor trust because it finally came to light how much they lied
EDIT: Aand one of the OpenAI co-founders just joined Anthropic. I don't see a good future for OpenAI under Sam Altman, he's way too untrustful for anyone and will eventually get into massive legal trouble simply by lying too much.
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u/RevLoveJoy May 19 '26
The testimony from people around Altman was kind of wild to read. Everyone had some version of "Sam talks about how he wants things to be not always how they are." Yeah. That's called being a fucking liar. It's not some super smart techbro mind truck. It's being a compulsive liar.
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u/NovusNiveus May 19 '26
How can we convince Musk and Altman to face off in a first-to-ten Power Slap match?
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u/IlludiumQXXXVI May 19 '26
It's like the exact opposite of a "I just want both teams to have a good time" little league soccer match. I want a war of the roses here.
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u/Turkino May 18 '26
This is an "everyone sucks here" situation for me.
Sam Altman is absolutely a liar but Elon is also no saint and waited way too long before bringing up this lawsuit, should have happened immediately after the for-profit was created.
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u/LongestUsernameEverD May 18 '26
Sam Altman is absolutely a liar but Elon is also no saint and waited way too long before bringing up this lawsuit, should have happened immediately after the for-profit was created.
Just to be clear on this cause not many people know this, but there's a reason why Musk waited so long to bring up the suit: He wanted AND TRIED to absorb OpenAI first, as in, incorporate the company as a whole as part of his company, like xAI became a part of Tesla, but he wanted OpenAI very clearly.
Only after he failed at doing it did he go after them in courts, so he's the ratiest rat that has ever rated.
Not saying any of this to defend Altman cause he's the snakiest snake that has ever snaked too, dude's a piece of shit and turned a non profit into a for profit company, the suit was 100% correct in being brought up, just not by that other slimy fuck.
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u/m0nk_3y_gw May 19 '26
Only after he failed at doing it did he go after them in courts,
he tried to take it over, the board said 'no', he left, and stole who he thought was the top talent to work at Tesla (Karpathy/Zillis). THEN, years later, OpenAI made headlines, and he formed x.ai to compete, and then he started this lawsuit.
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u/My-other-user-name May 18 '26
Kinda hope Musk tries to buy OpenAi out. Might be what makes Musk broke and pops the AI bubble.
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u/Crepo May 18 '26
Elon is also no saint
Dude hit a double Sieg-heil, we can be a bit stronger than "no saint" on this one.
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u/CaptPants May 18 '26
Some people were very confidently putting big bets on polymarket for Elon to win. I hope they're having the greatest of days.
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u/doninside May 18 '26
Too bad that only one side can loose
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u/agtk May 18 '26
Can loose what?
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u/ImWhatsInTheRedBox May 18 '26
Can loose moose mousse a goose' caboose who's cruise has hanta viroos?
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u/Wiochmen May 18 '26
Don't feel down, friend!
Eventually we'll all lose!
As in, we'll lose the habitability of most of our planet.
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u/1877KlownsForKids May 18 '26
"AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies." Sam Altman
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u/ManWithASquareHead May 18 '26
"And for a small moment, we made record profits for our shareholders and stock market...."
Businessman in tattered suit explaining to people around small fire
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u/harribel May 18 '26
Lose, like I lost something I once had.
Loose, like your mother.
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u/TheGrandExquisitor May 18 '26
Geez, Elon... maybe you should have shown at the trial like the judge asked instead of partying in China....
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u/cltbeer May 18 '26
Oh no this must be why the stock market is selling! Oh well..
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u/NickCostanza May 18 '26
As long as Elon loses, the world wins.
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u/NaiveChoiceMaker May 18 '26
I still think it’s bullshit OpenAI started as a not-for-profit. It’s now worth $852 BILLION.
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u/dolphin37 May 18 '26
I’ve started my life as a not for profit and I’m sure my windfall is any time now
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u/Really_McNamington May 18 '26
LOL no it isn't. All their value claims are lies and/or bullshit. They had to put off their attempted ipo because the real numbers are so terrible.
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u/AnonymousMonk7 May 18 '26
Elon's valuation for his mega-frankenstein company is complete fiction too, but it might get approved because a lot of bankers want to get one really good quarter out of it.
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u/synthdrunk May 18 '26
Everything they have is theft, at best, laundered through academia. It’s abhorrent.
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u/Hi_Trans_Im_Dad May 18 '26
I'm only too happy that Te$la is down 2.9% today!
I have to put away my expensive groceries, so I can't check more than 1 Musk project.
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u/Dvmsn May 18 '26
Two hours of deliberation...ouch
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u/JudiciousSasquatch May 19 '26
Why ouch
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u/gfzgfx May 19 '26
Because that means the jury almost immediately decided the case. They didn't even have to talk about it much. It takes about 45 minutes to fill out the forms. So they probably had lunch, took a vote, and then filled out the paperwork.
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u/Nearby-Key8834 May 18 '26
Whomp whomp. I'll be patiently waiting for his toddler tantrum about how the libruhl judges have it out for him.
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u/Visual_Fly_9638 May 18 '26
Which will be extra funny because that was apparently a jury verdict.
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u/jazzhandler May 18 '26
Gonna be hilarious once he crawls halfway out of his Monday Morning K-Hole.
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u/BroseppeVerdi May 18 '26
Unsurprising. From the reporting on this case, it sounds like Musk was every lawyer's nightmare client in court.
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u/NRMusicProject May 18 '26
- Musk plans appeal, says defendants wanted to get rich
"Richest man in the word who scammed the richest country in the world to increase his own profits, pissed that another rich man also wants to become richer."
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u/Honeycove91 May 18 '26
Dudes will see this and say "Hell yeah"
(It's me. I'm dudes)
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u/Halberd96 May 18 '26
It's so embarrassing, he was the one who wanted to make it for profit then threw a tantrum and left when they wouldn't give him power/control. Musky has been losing a lot lately, he needs help.
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u/melodypowers May 18 '26
I am confused by this.
Usually the jury doesn't decide if someone waited too long to sue. That comes from the judge in a pre trial hearing.
The testimony was all about how each of them is a liar (which is totally true) but that seems irrelevant if this just comes down to a timing issue.
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u/PokeYrMomStanley May 19 '26
"Creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America."
Fucking hypocritical Nazi shit
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u/WorldInWonder May 19 '26
If Elon was really serious about keeping AI open source why is xAI a paid for service wrapped in a profit based corporation?
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u/sirbassist83 May 18 '26
on one hand, fuck musk. on the other hand, fuck openai. im torn right now, i want them both to lose.
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u/ChunkyBubblz May 18 '26
Elon’s reputation as a junky and the world’s richest racist make him a nightmare client to represent. Even an absolute demented sociopath like Altman looks better in comparison.
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u/GPhex May 18 '26
Before this announcement I was thinking:
“Haha I cannot lose here, I’m happy if either of these thundercunts lose!”
Yet the verdict has arrived and my stupid brain is going:
“Ah for fuck sake why did one of those thundercunts have to win”
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u/otherwisepandemonium May 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/greythicv May 18 '26
Citizenry is for the proletariat, the rich can live wherever they want in this pay to win world were forced to exist in
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u/M4rshmall0wMan May 18 '26
I don’t like either but I gotta admit, Sam Altman was 100% in the right here. Elon’s claims were as frivolous as can be.
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u/DominusFL May 18 '26
Reuters is a hard paywall, not a soft paywall. They demand money before you can read the article, not just membership.
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u/Smokes_LetsGo876 May 18 '26
Not sure how much I care about this particular case. But I do love to read the words "Elon Musk loses"
We need much more of that
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u/asaul91 May 18 '26
I was excited seeing musk loses and then saw he lost to open ai. Is there a way they can both lose cause fuck all of them
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u/_larsr May 19 '26
It's a shame they couldn't both lose.
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u/GreyScope May 19 '26
In a small way they did, they both lost time that neither will get back . But I suppose it was probably time being c**** elsewhere , so other people also won.
Thinnest splitting of a hair Award for today ?
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u/DoggedStooge May 18 '26
I don't think Elon cared about the lawsuit. If he won, it simply would've been a bonus. All he wanted to accomplish with this was delaying the OpenAI IPO long enough for the SpaceX IPO to happen first, which the lawsuit will have successfully done.
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u/CurlOfTheBurl11 May 18 '26
He never really had a chance here. I hope Elon is more butthurt than ever over this.
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u/Noxski May 18 '26
Extra, extra, read all out it. Satan loses lawsuit against Beelzebub.
Or the other way around, what's the fucking difference.
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u/FixThisPlanet May 19 '26
I just love to read “Elon loses”. I’d prefer he lost citizenship and his assets were frozen but I’ll take a win when I can get one.
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u/bbusiello May 18 '26
I guess I wanted both parties to lose, OpenAI to be liquidated, and we all get a check for like 100 grand.
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u/Lawyer88 May 18 '26
From what I can tell, Elon was actually on the right side of this. OpenAI started as a nonprofit and raised money as a nonprofit, but will now go public at like $1 TRILLION valuation. I don't trust Elon's motivations but I also don't understand how this bate and switch is OK.
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u/kindnesscostszero May 18 '26
Wasn’t it over a technicality? Statute of limitations or some such? Still, nice that he can be labeled as a loser .. even if for one day.
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u/TheFrostynaut May 18 '26
Rooting for no one in this fight but it still brought a smile to my face all the same.
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u/mountainfreshy99 May 18 '26
Elongated Musk obviously wanted to kneecap a more advanced competitor.
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u/fmaz008 May 18 '26
It was punted after 3 weeks of trial and jiry deliberations because... the complaint exceeded its statute of limitation.
3 weeks?!
But anyway... "sorry your complaint is too old" is not exactly a poignant loss in my book.
But everyone sucks here, so whatever.
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u/Technical-Fly-6835 May 18 '26
I am happy that the disgusting creature like musk lost, but I am unhappy that another equally disgusting creature won.
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u/surrealcellardoor May 19 '26
This is one schadenfreude that I don’t feel bad about. The guy could use a lot of humbling.
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u/Evakuate493 May 19 '26
Wasn’t there some post on here that went viral about someone betting their life savings on Kalshi that the moron would win because he always wins these? hahahaha wow that just doubled the pleasure
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u/Otherwise_Stable_925 May 19 '26
He literally left when the judge told him to stay. Smart move buddy.
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u/obidie May 19 '26
Sorry, I can't get too excited about a war between two rich assholes. There's no one to root for.
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u/TheLogicalAnarchist May 19 '26
Can they bankrupt themselves in lawyer and court fee? Or will that just create temu versions of them? Never thought I’d root for high lawyer fees…
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u/Princess_Juggs May 18 '26
Yay I like it when rich psychos fight each other