Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., speaks at the Atreju convention in Rome, Italy, on Saturday, Dec. 16, 2023. The annual event, organized by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, began in 1998 as a convention for right-wing youths and has evolved into a political kermesse, including ministers and members of the opposition.
Alessia Pierdomenico | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI has challenged a foundational claim Tesla CEO Elon Musk made in the lawsuit he filed against the startup earlier this month.
As it seeks to commercialize its ChatGPT chatbot and underlying artificial intelligence models, OpenAI faces a slew of legal battles, including the one from Musk and cases over copyright infringement from the New York Times and authors. OpenAI reacted to Musk’s complaint last week by deriding it in a memo to employees and releasing emails involving him that go back to its earliest days.
Musk, who claimed breach of contract at the startup that he backed, referred in his complaint earlier this month to a 2015 “founding agreement” with him and two other OpenAI co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. The three were agreeing that a new AI lab would be a nonprofit for the benefit of humanity and that it would not keep information private for commercial benefit, Musk said.
He went on to say that in releasing the GPT-4 large language model last year without providing scientific details for public consumption, OpenAI breached that agreement.
“There is no Founding Agreement, or any agreement at all with Musk, as the complaint itself makes clear,” OpenAI said in a document on file with California’s superior court for San Francisco County. “The Founding Agreement is instead a fiction Musk has conjured to lay unearned claim to the fruits of an enterprise he initially supported, then abandoned, then watched succeed without him.”
Musk quoted OpenAI’s 2015 certificate of incorporation with the Delaware secretary of state, asserting that it “memorialized” the founding agreement. But OpenAI responded by saying that Musk’s complaint lacked an actual agreement.
The Microsoft-backed startup called Musk’s claims frivolous. But in a Monday blog post it said it was asking the court to designate the case as complex and obtain dedicated case management for it, because it involves AI and its claims go back almost 10 years.
In his complaint, Musk mentioned that, regarding OpenAI’s 2017 plan to establish a for-profit organization, he told Brockman, Altman and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever to “[e]ither go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit.”
OpenAI said in its filing, dated March 6, that if the case were to go to discovery, evidence would show that Musk was on board with the startup gaining for-profit structure.
Musk has his own AI lab called X.AI, which has released a chatbot called Grok that’s available through X, formerly known as Twitter, which Musk acquired in 2022. The startup will release Grok’s code under an open-source license this week, Musk said in an X post on Monday.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT had 100 million weekly users as of November.
“Seeing the remarkable technological advances OpenAI has achieved, Musk now wants that success for himself,” OpenAI said in its filing. “So he brings this action accusing Defendants of breaching a contract that never existed and duties Musk was never owed, demanding relief calculated to benefit a competitor to OpenAI.”
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
Read more CNBC tech news
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
Elon Musk meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House in Washington DC, USA on February 13, 2025.
Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images
Tesla will open a showroom in Mumbai, India next week, marking the U.S. electric carmakers first official foray into the country.
The one and a half hour launch event for the Tesla “Experience Center” will take place on July 15 at the Maker Maxity Mall in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, according to an event invitation seen by CNBC.
Along with the showroom display, which will feature the company’s cars, Tesla is also likely to officially launch direct sales to Indian customers.
The automaker has had its eye on India for a while and now appears to have stepped up efforts to launch locally.
In April, Tesla boss Elon Musk spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss collaboration in areas including technology and innovation. That same month, the EV-maker’s finance chief said the company has been “very careful” in trying to figure out when to enter the market.
Tesla has no manufacturing operations in India, even though the country’s government is likely keen for the company to establish a factory. Instead the cars sold in India will need to be imported from Tesla’s other manufacturing locations in places like Shanghai, China, and Berlin, Germany.
As Tesla begins sales in India, it will come up against challenges from long-time Chinese rival BYD, as well as local player Tata Motors.
One potential challenge for Tesla comes by way of India’s import duties on electric vehicles, which stand at around 70%. India has tried to entice investment in the country by offering companies a reduced duty of 15% if they commit to invest $500 million and set up manufacturing locally.
HD Kumaraswamy, India’s minister for heavy industries, told reporters in June that Tesla is “not interested” in manufacturing in the country, according to a Reuters report.
Tesla is looking to recruit roles in Mumbai, job listings posted on LinkedIn . These include advisors working in showrooms, security, vehicle operators to collect data for its Autopilot feature and service technicians.
There are also roles being advertised in the Indian capital of New Delhi, including for store managers. It’s unclear if Tesla is planning to launch a showroom in the city.