Elon Musk calls on California and Delaware to force auction of OpenAI stake

A lawyer for Elon Musk has called on the California and Delaware attorneys-general to force OpenAI to auction off a large stake in its business, intensifying a bitter fight with the company’s chief executive Sam Altman.

In a letter to the states’ top law officers seen by the Financial Times, Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff said he was writing on behalf of big artificial intelligence investors who wanted to participate in an open and competitive bidding process for the OpenAI stake.

OpenAI had no plans for such an auction, according to a person with knowledge of the ChatGPT-maker’s thinking. Musk’s camp simply “want more chaos”, they added. The highly unusual effort follows lawsuits launched by Musk in the past year over the attempt by OpenAI, which was founded as a non-profit dedicated to ensuring AI benefits humanity, to restructure as a for-profit company.

Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman and nine others in 2015, and was the most significant early funder before leaving the board in 2018 after clashing with Altman.

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