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Things haven’t been going well for Elon Musk lately, and this week hasn’t been an exception.
After a highly volatile trading week, Tesla stock is still struggling against difficult market conditions. Even its lack of direct exposure to the recently imposed auto industry tariffs hasn’t been enough to shield it from the forces pushing down most tech leaders.
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However, things look particularly grim for Tesla following the company’s recent deliveries miss. It came in below Wall Street estimates, even after analysts scaled back their forecasts. Meanwhile, Tesla owners have been rushing to sell their cars to protest Musk’s political stances.
Tesla isn’t the only Musk-owned company that is facing considerable challenges, though. His quest to conquer another industry recently took a disappointing turn, resulting in legal action from one of his biggest rivals.
Musk is being sued by a company he wants to own
The personal computing boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s is often defined by a rivalry between two industry titans: Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Apple founder Steve Jobs. Decades later, a new rivalry has come to define Silicon Valley, one between Musk and OpenAI founder Sam Altman.
Musk originally backed OpenAI when the nonprofit artificial intelligence (AI) research organization launched in 2015. A few years later, he attempted to take control of it, claiming it had fallen behind Google and required strong, corrective action, a proposal Altman and the rest of OpenAI’s leaders quickly rejected.
Related: Elon Musk gets more bad China news
Although Musk would walk away from OpenAI following this defeat, he never quite abandoned his quest to take it over.
In February 2025, he submitted a bid to acquire its for-profit assets for $97.4 billion. Now, OpenAI has announced that it is countersuing him for harassment and other bad-faith actions.
“Through press attacks, malicious campaigns broadcast to Musk’s more than 200 million followers on the social media platform he controls, a pretextual demand for corporate records, harassing legal claims and a sham bid for OpenAI’s assets, Musk has tried every tool available to harm OpenAI,” the company stated in a lawsuit.
Musk responded to the announcement by commenting on an X post with the words “Scam Altman is at it again,” lending support to OpenAI’s claims that he has been harassing it.