United States District Judge Mark Pittman rejected xAI’s attempt to keep Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX emails from being found in a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI. Here are the details.
Musk to change more things to find
Last month, the legal teams of Apple, OpenAI, X, and xAI held a hearing before United States Magistrate Judge Hal R. Ray, Jr., to address several disagreements regarding the discovery process in the lawsuit filed by Elon Musk against Apple and OpenAI.
The lawsuit stemmed from Musk’s dissatisfaction with Grok’s positions in the app store, which he said were the result of a conflict between Apple and OpenAI over their relationship with ChatGPT’s Siri and Apple Intelligence powerhouses.
At the hearing, Judge Ray granted X and xAI’s request to include Craig Federighi as a guardian, and also granted X and xAI’s request to compel Apple to turn over documents related to its recent agreement with Google for Gemini to enable the new Siri.
In another ruling, Judge Ray accepted OpenAI’s argument that Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX emails should be searched for material relevant to the case.
Layers X and xAI initially told the court that these documents fell outside of their control, because they did not oversee SpaceX or Tesla. However, the argument did not sway Judge Ray.
In the end, OpenAI’s argument that Musk “is the CEO of all of these companies, and these are the accounts that he clearly uses for the business of all of these companies” succeeded, helped in part by the fact that there were “internal documents where his own CFO at X.AI sent him an email about X.AI’s business from his SpaceX account.”
Yesterday, the legal team for X and xAI filed an objection in an attempt to overturn Judge Ray’s decision. They also applied for a stay of the order pending the court’s decision on the objection.
Today, Judge Pittman, who had referred those discovery disputes to Judge Ray (a common practice in federal courts), dismissed X and xAI’s motion, affirmed Judge Ray’s findings, and, accordingly, also denied X and xAI’s motion to stay.
In his order, Judge Pittman wrote:
Here, because there is reason to believe that Musk may be conducting X and/or xAI business on his SpaceX and Tesla business email accounts, the emails are available and must be produced. Those pieces of evidence consistent with Musk’s ownership and high-level roles in these companies compel the Court to do this.
Again
As noted, the record also provides some reason to believe that Musk may be conducting plaintiffs’ business from some of his email accounts. For example, xAI’s CFO sent xAI’s financial updates to Musk’s SpaceX email address. That alone is enough to compel discovery here because iX and xAI are entitled to documents where the CEO uses non-company email accounts to conduct company business—whether those are personal email accounts or not is irrelevant.
Judge Pittman did not set a deadline for the production of these emails.
During the hearing on May 13, Judge Ray asked the lawyers of X and xAI how long it would take to produce the emails, the legal team replied that they did not know, adding that “it will take a little time, but we will go as soon as possible, if we are ordered to do so.”
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