Musk wants the court to slow OpenAI’s roll

He wants a crackdown on OpenAI allegedly telling its investors to boycott investing in other AI startups.

12/3/24 3:16PM

Another bit of Elon news: on Friday, he filed a preliminary injunction against OpenAI in federal court to stop the $157 billion startup from converting into a fully for-profit business. For context, Musk, who cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 and left the company after a disagreement with its other cofounders over the company’s direction, already sued OpenAI twice in the last year, first in a San Francisco court in March, before dropping that lawsuit and refiling a new suit in federal court in August.

In the previous suits, Musk alleged that he was “courted and deceived” by Sam Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman to cofound a nonprofit while Altman always intended to build out a for-profit company under the surface. Musk, whose AI startup xAI is a competitor to OpenAI, has said in his latest injunction that OpenAI led a group boycott of investment capital blocking its current investors from investing in xAI, and that the company should be blocked from “benefitting from wrongfully obtained competitively sensitive information or coordination via the Microsoft-OpenAI board interlocks.”

Basically, Musk doesn’t want OpenAI to convert to a for-profit model, as it goes against the company’s charter, and he wants to prevent OpenAI from allegedly requiring investors to not invest in its competitors. Of course, he has 50 billion reasons to want to slow down OpenAI, given xAI’s recent fundraise, but it is interesting to see the CEO of the world’s most valuable auto company and one of its highest-profile AI companies playing defense in the court with one company, while he’s full-court pressing with the other.

Max Knoblauch17h

The Trump administration is reportedly planning a 50% made-in-America requirement for USMCA tariff relief

Qualifying for USMCA-related lower tariffs may soon require more US-made vehicle components, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump administration is reportedly planning to introduce a 50% US content requirement for vehicles covered by the trade pact to receive lower tariffs. The content would be measured by cost, according to the WSJ.

There currently isn’t any US-specific requirement for those lower tariff rates, but in order to receive preferential tariffs, vehicles are must contain at least 75% regional content (components made in North America). Per Reuters reporting, the Trump admin is seeking to raise the regional requirement to 82%.

These reported plans are subject to change as the US negotiates USMCA terms with Mexico over the next few months.

Overall, Tesla will likely have the easiest time qualifying for any stricter requirements. The automaker’s vehicles contained the highest amount of US/Canadian content in 2025, according to American University research. Ford, GM, and Stellantis all scored lower.

Notably: the underlying government data that many domestic content measurements rely on intentionally combines US and Canadian components, so it’s difficult to know exactly how much of any given vehicle is specifically US-made.

Exclusive | Trump Administration Wants Autos Under USMCA to Be at Least 50% Made in America

These reported plans are subject to change as the US negotiates USMCA terms with Mexico over the next few months.

Tom Jones23h

The $640,000 Luce makes the average Ferrari look like a bargain

Put aside the shape; put aside the smoothing out of Ferrari’s iconic sharp edges; put aside, even, the calls from former Chairman and President Luca Cordero di Montezemolo to “take the Prancing Horse off.” On the grounds of price alone, Luce detractors might have a point.

By now, many of us will have read the criticisms of Ferrari’s first fully electric vehicle, as the Luce — which was unveiled to the world earlier this week and promptly saw the company’s shares crash out in New York and Milan — gets subtly shaded by competitors online and not-so-subtly shaded by basically everyone else.

What makes all of this worse for Ferrari is that, even by the luxury car maker’s notoriously high standards, they’ve slapped a pretty hefty price tag on the Luce, and the company’s CEO, Benedetto Vigna, has already been forced to defend the €550,000 ($640,000) price point, saying yesterday that it’s “fair to pay for innovation,” per Reuters.

While Ferrari’s cars have been getting more expensive of late, as recently as 2022, Ferrari’s average revenue per car sold was around $340,000. At nearly twice that price, this new electric model is obviously proving a little much (visually, conceptually, and financially) for many loyal and long-standing fans of the Prancing Horse to stomach.