Elon Musk tried to enlist Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg as part of his unsolicited $97.4 billion bid to take over OpenAI earlier this year, according to court filings.
A consortium of investors led by Muskoffered to buy the nonprofitthat controls OpenAI in February as part ofthe billionaire's continuing legal battlewith the company he co-founded alongside Sam Altman.
OpenAI stated in a court filing on Thursday that Musk had communicated with Zuckerberg about "potential financing arrangements or investments" in OpenAI. It was unclear what form the communication took, and neither Zuckerberg nor Meta signed a letter of intent or participated in the bid, according to the filing.
In a response included in the filing, Meta said there was no evidence that representatives of the company had coordinated with Musk on the OpenAI bid. Meta and OpenAI declined to comment on the filing. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Any partnership between Musk and Zuckerberg would have marked a rare coming together of two powerful tech billionaires who have clashed publicly in the past, and who are both heavily invested in the race to build the next generation of AI models.
Musk and Zuckerberg have had a simmering feud for years, occasionally taking public shots at each other over AI and other topics. Tensions have only increased since Musk's 2022acquisition of Twitter, now called X.A year laterThe pair agreed via social-media posts to a cage fight.
Altman and Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but their relationship deteriorated when Musk left in 2018 following a power struggle. It worsened when Musk responded to the launch of ChatGPT by launching his own rival startup, xAI.
Musk hasfiled lawsuits against OpenAIallegedly straying from its founding principles, questioned the startup's ties with Microsoft and asked a court to stop restructuring efforts at the company.
Earlier this month Musktook his fight with OpenAI to Apple, claiming the tech giant had acted anticompetitively by promoting OpenAI's ChatGPT while suppressing his Grok AI chatbot in the App Store.
Musk called Apple's App Store rankings an "unequivocal antitrust violation" in a social media post and threatened "immediate legal action." Apple dismissed the accusation of bias.
OpenAI is governed by a nonprofit board, which controls the for-profit entity. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Write to Gareth Vipers atgareth.vipers@wsj.com
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