Apple’s OpenAI Deal Faces Discovery in Musk Lawsuit Over Grok
What You Need to Know
- Federal judge ruled Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX emails are discoverable in his lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI.
- Musk claims Apple’s ChatGPT partnership with OpenAI unfairly suppressed visibility of his competing Grok product on App Store.
- Apple must also produce documents about its Google Gemini agreement, expanding discovery beyond the OpenAI deal Musk targeted.
- No deadline set for email production, allowing potential delays in Musk’s legal team’s compliance with discovery orders.
A federal judge has confirmed that Elon Musk’s emails from his Tesla and SpaceX accounts are fair game in discovery for the lawsuit he filed against Apple and OpenAI. The ruling came after Musk’s own companies tried to block it, arguing that Tesla and SpaceX are not parties to the case.
That argument did not hold. OpenAI pointed out that Musk routinely mixes business across his companies, and the court found a concrete example: xAI’s own CFO had sent company financial updates to Musk’s SpaceX email address. That single data point made the jurisdictional objection difficult to sustain.
The lawsuit itself centers on Musk’s claim that Apple’s partnership with OpenAI, which embedded ChatGPT into Siri and Apple Intelligence, gave OpenAI an unfair platform advantage and suppressed the visibility of his competing product, Grok, on the App Store. Musk is simultaneously the plaintiff and the person whose cross-company email habits are now being examined by the defendant he sued.
Discovery Cuts Both Ways
Apple is not walking away clean either. Judge Ray separately ruled that Apple must produce documents related to its agreement with Google for Gemini, which suggests the court sees competitive arrangements across the AI ecosystem as relevant, not just the OpenAI deal Musk is targeting.
District Judge Mark Pittman denied both of X and xAI’s requests: the objection to the underlying ruling and the request to pause proceedings while that objection was reviewed. No deadline has been set for actual email production, and lawyers for Musk’s companies told the court they could not estimate how long gathering the records would take.
That open timeline is the detail worth watching. Discovery without a production deadline gives Musk’s legal team room to slow-walk compliance, and courts in complex commercial cases have seen that pattern before. Whether Pittman sets a hard deadline in subsequent proceedings will say more about the pace of this case than any ruling so far.
0 Comments