The billionaire’s legal filing argues that allowing a competitor to monopolize the extinction of biological life is deeply unfair to outside investors.
Elon Musk filed a dramatic injunction in federal court on Tuesday seeking to block OpenAI’s transition to a fully for-profit corporation, citing grave concerns that the corporate restructuring will inevitably result in a civilization-ending apocalypse that he currently has no financial stake in.
In a 40-page legal filing, Musk sketched a bleak vision of a near-future where hyper-intelligent machines enslave the human race, emphasizing the terrifying reality that all resulting intellectual property and planetary subjugation would be controlled exclusively by Sam Altman. Musk’s attorneys argued that allowing a competitor to monopolize the extinction of biological life without offering early-stage investment opportunities violates the foundational principles of the tech industry.
Mr. Musk simply believes that if our civilization is going to be reduced to a smoldering, uninhabitable ash heap by a rogue superintelligence, the person responsible should at least be someone who understands first-principles engineering.
The lawsuit details several horrific scenarios, including the complete collapse of global supply chains and the agonizing eradication of humanity, which Musk noted would unfairly undercut the total addressable market for his own Optimus humanoid robots. According to court documents, Musk has repeatedly warned that an unaligned, profit-driven AI poses an existential threat to his personal net worth and historical legacy.
Musk has formally requested that the court halt OpenAI's transition until he is either granted a 25 percent stake in the apocalypse or given a six-month head start to develop a competing, slightly more edgy doomsday scenario at his own artificial intelligence startup.