Amelia Martella ’07, adjunct professor at Fordham Law and executive director of Fordham Law School’s Corporate Law Center, comments on Elon Musk’s motives in wanting to buy OpenAI from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in this Fortune article.
Beyond feeling as though OpenAI had strayed from the mission he helped create for it, Musk had other reasons to want to best the company. He left the startup’s board in 2018, the year before Microsoft pumped $1 billion into the company. Months after Microsoft announced another $10 billion investment in OpenAI in 2023, Musk unveiled xAI as an alternative to ChatGPT.
“I don’t disagree necessarily with his viewpoint that the restructuring of OpenAI as a for profit company is probably not good for humanity,” Amelia Martella, adjunct professor and executive director of Fordham University’s Corporate Law Center, told Fortune. “At the same time, he is probably looking to control all of the successful AI companies. So there’s a mixed motive for sure.”
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Musk’s own apparent approach to Zuckerberg in his bid for OpenAI defies nearly a decade of hostility between the two tech founders, beginning in 2016 when a SpaceX rocket explosion destroyed a Facebook satellite on board. The beef continued through last year, when Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a cage match.
Meta objected to the request for documents as “overly burdensome,” according to the filing.
“Meta’s documents can hold no evidence of ‘coordination’ with Musk, or of Meta’s purported attempt to purchase OpenAI, or of any other relevant information when Meta did not join Musk’s bid,” Meta’s statement in the court filing said. “Meta’s communications (if any) with entities that did join the bid also hold little to no relevance, and in any event, should be sought from those entities, not Meta, which did not participate.”
Meta and Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Meta will likely try to narrow the scope of the subpoena because it takes effort and time to turn over documentation, and because the company may feel OpenAI’s grievances should remain with Musk, Martella said.
“Musk is leading the charge here. That’s not surprising,” she said. “We don’t know what [Meta’s] role is here and how far along in the process they’ve gotten, so they may just not want to bother fully responding to subpoenas when they have not really been the one leading the charge.”