Presumably, yes, the remedy would be to unwind the for-profit subsidiary and return to the original stated goals. Wouldn’t even be ultra vires, so to speak, because of how they set it up in the first place—to be dissolved at the wave of a hand by the non-profit board.
However, I think there is about 0% probability of this. I can’t think of any lawsuit remotely like this which succeeded. Non-profits are accorded incredible deference on this sort of thing. The board members could be diving Donald Duck-style into piles of cash and a judge would not want to overrule them on these threadbare grounds. If all Musk has is some emails vaguely discussing goals many years ago and he’s butthurt about what OA LLC is doing now, he’s got nothing.
This just looks like typical Musk lawfare harassment, similar to his attempts to get out of his ironclad Twitter purchase agreement or random libel lawsuit threats—it’s just sniping at OA and embarrassing it. The billionaire’s equivalent of leaving the standard ‘OpenAI? Not so open now are they?’ comment. (He may even have persuaded himself he has a case, but he doesn’t.)
It’s not like it costs him anything but money or risks backfiring in any meaningful way. The worst that can happen to him is that the judge dismisses all of it at the first opportunity and he loses <0.01% of his net worth in high-powered legal fees. (Presumably Sam Altman is already pissed off at Musk and can’t really be made madder.) Well worth it to embarrass OA publicly. (And if you believe Jimmy Apples, it’s already hampered OA internally. Every day counts in DL now, and how could you spend, say, $0.1m to help X.ai more effectively catch up to OA than this lawsuit...?)
Presumably, yes, the remedy would be to unwind the for-profit subsidiary and return to the original stated goals. Wouldn’t even be ultra vires, so to speak, because of how they set it up in the first place—to be dissolved at the wave of a hand by the non-profit board.
However, I think there is about 0% probability of this. I can’t think of any lawsuit remotely like this which succeeded. Non-profits are accorded incredible deference on this sort of thing. The board members could be diving Donald Duck-style into piles of cash and a judge would not want to overrule them on these threadbare grounds. If all Musk has is some emails vaguely discussing goals many years ago and he’s butthurt about what OA LLC is doing now, he’s got nothing.
This just looks like typical Musk lawfare harassment, similar to his attempts to get out of his ironclad Twitter purchase agreement or random libel lawsuit threats—it’s just sniping at OA and embarrassing it. The billionaire’s equivalent of leaving the standard ‘OpenAI? Not so open now are they?’ comment. (He may even have persuaded himself he has a case, but he doesn’t.)
It’s not like it costs him anything but money or risks backfiring in any meaningful way. The worst that can happen to him is that the judge dismisses all of it at the first opportunity and he loses <0.01% of his net worth in high-powered legal fees. (Presumably Sam Altman is already pissed off at Musk and can’t really be made madder.) Well worth it to embarrass OA publicly. (And if you believe Jimmy Apples, it’s already hampered OA internally. Every day counts in DL now, and how could you spend, say, $0.1m to help X.ai more effectively catch up to OA than this lawsuit...?)
EDIT: one lawyer’s analysis: “So many words for a lot of nothing of a case.”