Consider what happened in a single week: OpenAI, the nonprofit founded to be a “counterweight” to Google, whose CEO said he “kinda hates” ads, announced it will serve targeted ads based on your ChatGPT conversations. The same day, OpenAI published a blog post titled “The Truth Elon Left Out,” responding to Musk’s fraud lawsuit not in court filings but in the court of public opinion.
The Brockman diary entries have been buzzing on social media. “[Musk’s] story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for profit just without him,” one entry reads. OpenAI’s response reframes the narrative: the diary entries, they argue, show cofounders wrestling with how to pursue the mission after Elon’s own demands torpedoed negotiations. According to the blog post, Musk agreed in 2017 that OpenAI needed a for-profit arm, the exact structure he’s now suing over, but talks collapsed when the founders refused to give him majority equity and “absolute control.”
In OpenAI’s telling, Musk wanted to merge the firm with Tesla. When that failed, he quit, telling them they had “0% chance” of raising the billions needed without him. The company calls the lawsuit “part of a broader strategy of harassment” designed to advantage xAI. As for the diary line about not being “honest”? OpenAI says that was Greg Brockman’s fear about hypothetically accepting Elon’s terms and then pivoting, terms they claim to have never actually accepted.
Meanwhile, xAI’s Grok landed a $200 million Pentagon contract, the same AI that was banned in Indonesia and Malaysia this month after its “digital undressing” feature flooded X with nonconsensual sexual images of women and minors. The California Attorney General opened an investigation Wednesday, calling the proliferation of imagery “shocking” and noting xAI marketed “spicy mode” as a feature. European regulators are also investigating. When media asked xAI for comment, the company’s response: “Legacy Media Lies.” The EPA also ruled xAI’s Memphis data center turbines illegal.
And somehow, Microsoft, whose partnership with OpenAI Musk himself pushed for, according to court documents, is now OpenAI’s largest investor, a co-defendant in Musk’s lawsuit, and xAI’s cloud partner all at once. Musk is apparently poking fun at the arrangement by naming xAI’s new data centers “MACROHARDRR,” part of a trademarked project to build an AI-run software company that “simulates” Microsoft.
The timeline below tracks how we got here.
