OpenAI on Tuesday publicly responded to a lawsuit brought by co-founder Elon Musk, highlighting apparent hypocrisy on the part of the now-billionaire and early backer of the company.
In its response, OpenAI reproduced old emails from Musk in which the Tesla and SpaceX CEO encouraged the rising startup to raise at least $1 billion in funding, and agreed that it should “start being less open” over time and “not share” the company’s science with the public.
The reproduced messages follow a starkly different point of view Musk represented last week, when he sued OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, alleging breach of contract and unfair competition.
In the suit, Musk’s attorneys allege that the inner workings of OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model are “a complete secret except to OpenAI—and, on information and belief, Microsoft,” and that the secrecy is driven by commercial purpose rather than safety. OpenAI said, “We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims.”
In November, Musk told an audience at the The New York Times’ DealBook conference that OpenAI had deviated from its original mission in his view.
“OpenAI should be renamed ‘super closed source for maximum profit AI,’ because this is what it actually is,” Musk said onstage at the event. He noted that it’s transformed from an “open source foundation” to multibillion-dollar “for-profit corporation with closed source.”
By contrast, Musk appeared to discourage OpenAI co-founders from taking a too-lean approach to fundraising, according to emails the company reproduced from December 2018. He wrote that OpenAI had a zero-percent chance of becoming a relevant competitor to Google’s DeepMind unless the startup made a “dramatic change in execution and resources.”
“My probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise,” Musk wrote in one email to fellow OpenAI co-founders Sutskever, Brockman and Altman. “Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it.”
Musk is now the CEO of automaker Tesla, defense contractor SpaceX and the owner of X Corp., as well as the founder of brain computer interface startup Neuralink, and a would-be competitor to OpenAI that he named xAI.
Before he left OpenAI, the company said in its response to his lawsuit, “Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO” of the AI venture. The startup also said in its blog post that Musk sought to become OpenAI’s CEO in 2017 as it was changing its structure.
Musk’s companies have, at times, attracted talent away from OpenAI. In the case of xAI, Musk positions the company’s first product, Grok, as competitive with OpenAI’s software ChatGPT.
In emails from January 2018 reproduced by OpenAI, Musk agrees with an unnamed sender who encouraged the startup’s co-founders to rely on Tesla as their “cash cow.” Going into the first quarter of 2018, Tesla reported a cash balance of $3.4 billion, after it reported a net loss of $2.24 billion for the full year in 2017 on revenue that year of $11.8 billion.
CNBC has not independently verified the authenticity of the emails included in OpenAI’s response on Tuesday, some of which contained partial redactions.
The “contract” at the heart of Musk’s recent lawsuit against OpenAI isn’t a formal written agreement signed by all parties involved in creating the company.
Instead, Musk via his attorneys argues that the early OpenAI team had forged agreements to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI, “for the benefit of humanity” as a nonprofit. However, the project was transformed into a company with a complex corporate structure including a for-profit entity that Musk argues is largely controlled by Microsoft.
Musk used much of his legal complaint to remind the world of his central position in the creation of OpenAI, which has become one of the hottest startups on the planet, thanks largely to the viral spread of ChatGPT and image generator DALL-E.
OpenAI’s public response on Tuesday night mirrored executives’ memos sent to employees at the company last week.
Musk’s lawsuit and OpenAI’s response follow a rollercoaster few months for the company including board room drama, a reshuffling of the board and an investigation by financial regulators.
Attorneys for Elon Musk were not available to comment on Tuesday night after OpenAI published its response.
Amazon announced Monday its millionth worker robot, and said its entire fleet will be powered by a newly launched generative artificial intelligence model. The move comes at a time when more tech companies are cutting jobs and warning of automation.
The million robot milestone — which joins Amazon’s global network of more than 300 facilities — strengthens the company’s position as the world’s largest manufacturer and operator of mobile robotics, Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, said in a press release.
Meanwhile, Dresser said that its new “DeepFleet” AI model will coordinate the movement of its robots within its fulfillment centers, reducing the travel time of the fleet by 10% and enabling faster and more cost-effective package deliveries.
Amazon began deploying robots in its facilities in 2012 to move inventory shelves across warehouse floors, according to Dresser. Since then, their roles in factories have grown tremendously, ranging from those able to lift up to 1,250 pounds of inventory to fully autonomous robots that navigate factories with carts of customer orders.
Meanwhile, AI-powered humanoid robots — designed to mimic human movement and shape — could be deployed this year at factories owned by Tesla.
Job security fears
But although advancements in AI robotics like those working in Amazon facilities come with the promise of productivity gains, they have also raised concerns about mass job loss.
A Pew Research survey published in March found that both AI experts and the general public see factory workers as one of the groups most at risk of losing their jobs because of AI.
That’s a concern Dresser appeared to attempt to address in his statements.
“These robots work alongside our employees, handling heavy lifting and repetitive tasks while creating new opportunities for our front-line operators to develop technical skills,” Dresser said. He added that Amazon’s “next-generation fulfillment center” in Shreveport, Louisiana, which was launched late last year, required 30% more employees in reliability, maintenance and engineering roles.
However, the news of Amazon’s robot expansion came soon after CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC that Amazon’s rapid rollout of generative AI will result in “fewer people doing some of the jobs that the technology actually starts to automate.”
Jassy said that even as AI eliminates jobs in certain areas, Amazon will continue to hire more employees in AI, robotics and elsewhere. But in a memo to employees earlier in June, the CEO had admitted that he expects the company’s workforce to shrink in the coming years in light of technological advancements.
The decline may have already begun. CNBC reported that Amazon cut more than 27,000 jobs in 2022 and 2023, and had continued to make more targeted cuts across business units.
Other big tech CEOs such as Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke also recently warned of the impact that AI will have on staffing. That comes as a vast array of firms investing in and adopting AI execute rounds of layoffs.
According to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks technology industry layoffs, 551 companies laid off roughly 153,000 employees last year. And a World Economic Forum report in February found that 48% of U.S. employers plan to reduce their workforce due to AI.
U.S. President Donald Trump (right) and C.C. Wei, chief executive officer of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (left), shake hands during an announcement of an additional $100 billion into TSMC’s U.S. manufacturing at the White House in Washington, DC, U.S., on March 3, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The latest version of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” could make it cheaper for semiconductor manufacturers to build plants in the U.S. as Washington continues its efforts to strengthen its domestic chip supply chain.
Under the bill, passed by the Senate Tuesday, tax credits for those semiconductor firms would rise to 35% from 25%. That’s more than the 30% increase that had made it into a draft version of the bill.
The new provisions expand on tax incentives under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which provided grants of $39 billion and loans of $75 billion for U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing projects.
But before the expanded credits come into play, Trump’s sweeping domestic policy package will have to be passed again in the House, which narrowly passed its own version last month. The president has urged lawmakers to get the bill passed by July 4.
Trump versus Biden
Since Trump’s first term, Washington has been trying to onshore more of the advanced semiconductor supply chain from Asia, support its domestic players and limit China’s capabilities.
Although tax provisions in Trump’s sweeping policy bill expand on those in the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, his overall approach to the semiconductor industry has been different.
Earlier this year, the president even called for a repeal of the CHIPS Act, though Republican lawmakers have been reluctant to act on that front. Still, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last month that the administration was renegotiating some of the Biden administration’s grants.
Trump has previously stated that tariffs, as opposed to the CHIPS Act grants, would be the best method of onshoring semiconductor production. The Trump administration is currently conducting an investigation into imports of semiconductor technology, which could result in new duties on the industry.
In recent months, a number of chipmakers with projects in the U.S. have ramped up planned investments there. That includes the world’s largest contract chipmaker, TSMC, as well as American chip companies such as Nvidia, Micron and GlobalFoundries.
According to Daniel Newman, CEO at tech advisory firm Futurum Group, the threat of Trump’s tariffs has created more urgency for semiconductor companies to expand U.S. capacity. If the increased investment tax credits come into law, those onshoring efforts are only expected to accelerate, he told CNBC.
“Given the risk of tariffs, increasing manufacturing in the U.S. remains a key consideration for these large semiconductor companies,” Newman said, adding that the tax credits could be seen as an opportunity to offset certain costs related to U.S.-based projects.
Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, May 21, 2025.
Jim Lo Scalzo | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla shares have dropped 7% from Friday’s closing price of $323.63to the $300.71 close on Tuesday ahead of the company’s second-quarter deliveries report.
Wall Street analysts are expecting Tesla to report deliveries of around 387,000 — a 13% decline compared to deliveries of nearly 444,000 a year ago, according to a consensus compiled by FactSet. Prediction market Kalshi told CNBC on Tuesday that its traders forecast deliveries of around 364,000.
Shares in the electric vehicle maker had been rising after Tesla started a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, in late June and CEO Elon Musk boasted of its first “driverless delivery” of a car to a customer there.
The stock price took a turn after Musk on Saturday reignited a feud with President Donald Trump over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the massive spending bill that the commander-in-chief endorsed. The bill is now heading for a final vote in the House.
That legislation would benefit higher-income households in the U.S. while slashing spending on programs such as Medicaid and food assistance.
Musk did not object to cuts to those specific programs. However, Musk on X said the bill would worsen the U.S. deficit and raise the debt ceiling. The bill includes tax cuts that would add around $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
The Tesla CEO has also criticized aspects of the bill that would cut hundreds of billions of dollars in support for renewable energy development in the U.S. and phase out tax credits for electric vehicles.
Such changes could hurt Tesla as they are expected to lower EV sales by roughly 100,000 vehicles per year by 2035, according to think tank Energy Innovation.
The bill is also expected to reduce renewable energy development by more than 350 cumulative gigawatts in that same time period, according to Energy Innovation. That could pressure Tesla’s Energy division, which sells solar and battery energy storage systems to utilities and other clean energy project developers.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that Musk was, “upset that he’s losing his EV mandate,” but that the tech CEO could “lose a lot more than that.” Trump was alluding to the subsidies, incentives and contracts that Musk’s many businesses have relied on.
SpaceX has received over $22 billion from work with the federal government since 2008, according to FedScout, which does federal spending and government contract research. That includes contracts from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, among others.
Tesla has reported $11.8 billion in sales of “automotive regulatory credits,” or environmental credits, since 2015, according to an evaluation of the EV maker’s financial filings by Geoff Orazem, CEO of FedScout.
These incentives are largely derived from federal and state regulations in the U.S. that require automakers to sell some number of low-emission vehicles or buy credits from companies like Tesla, which often have an excess.
Regulatory credit sales go straight to Tesla’s bottom line. Credit revenue amounted to approximately 60% of Tesla’s net income in the second quarter of 2024.