US District Judge Mark Pittman rejected xAI’s attempt to keep Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX emails out of discovery in the lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI. Here are the details.
Musk will deliver more material for discovery
Last month, the legal teams for Apple, OpenAI,
The lawsuit arose from Musk’s dissatisfaction with Grok’s App Store ratings, which he claimed were the result of a anticompetitive collusion between Apple and OpenAI due to their partnership to have ChatGPT power parts of Siri and Apple Intelligence.
At the hearing, Judge Ray accepted X and xAI’s request to list Craig Federighi as custodian, and also accepted X and xAI’s request to force Apple to hand over documents related to its recent deal with Google for Gemini to power the new Siri.
In another decision, Judge Ray accepted OpenAI’s argument that material relevant to the lawsuit should be sought in emails from Tesla and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The X and xAI layers initially told the court that these documents were outside their custody and control, because they did not represent SpaceX or Tesla. Still, the argument did not convince Judge Ray.
In the end, OpenAI’s argument that Musk is “the CEO of all of these companies, and these are accounts that he clearly uses for all of these companies’ businesses” won, helped in part by the fact that there were “internal documents in which his own X.AI CFO sends him emails about X.AI business in his SpaceX account.”
Yesterday, the legal teams of X and xAI filed an objection in an attempt to reverse Judge Ray’s decision. They also filed an application to stay 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 litigation), canceled X and xAI’s motion affirmed Judge Ray’s findings and, as a result, also denied X and xAI’s motion to stay the decision.
In his order, Judge Pittman wrote:
In this case, 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 discoverable and must occur. That evidence, along with Musk’s ownership and high-level roles in these companies, compels the Court to accept this decision.
AND
As mentioned, the filing also provides specific reasons to believe that Musk may have the plaintiffs conduct business on his other email accounts. For example, xAI’s CFO sent xAI financial updates to Musk’s SpaceX email address. That alone is enough to require discovery here because X and xAI have a right to obtain documents when a CEO uses non-company email accounts to conduct company business; Whether they are personal email accounts or not is not decisive.
Judge Pittman did not set a deadline for the production of these emails.
During the May 13 hearing, Judge Ray asked attorneys for
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