United States District Judge Mark Pittman has 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 to turn over more material for discovery
Last month, the legal teams of Apple, OpenAI, X, and xAI had a hearing before United States Magistrate Judge Hal R. Ray, Jr., to address several disagreements regarding the discovery process in the lawsuit Elon Musk filed against Apple and OpenAI.
The lawsuit stemmed from Musk’s dissatisfaction with Grok’s rankings in the App Store, which he claimed were the result of an anticompetitive collusion between Apple and OpenAI due to their partnership to have ChatGPT power parts of Siri and Apple Intelligence.
In the hearing, Judge Ray accepted X and xAI’s request to include Craig Federighi as a custodian, and also accepted X and xAI’s request to compel Apple to turn over documents regarding its recent agreement with Google to have Gemini power the new Siri.
In another decision, Judge Ray accepted OpenAI’s argument that Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX emails should be searched for relevant material in the lawsuit.
X and xAI’s layers initially told the court that these documents fell outside their custody and control, because they didn’t represent SpaceX or Tesla. Still, the argument didn’t persuade 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 business for all of these companies” won out, partially helped by the fact that there were “internal documents where his own CFO at X.AI is emailing him about X.AI business at his SpaceX account.”
Yesterday, the X and xAI legal teams filed an objection in an attempt to reverse Judge Ray’s decision. They also filed a request to pause 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), overruled X and xAI’s request, 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:
Here, because there is reason to believe Musk may be conducting X and/or xAI business on his SpaceX and Tesla business email accounts, the emails are discoverable and should be produced. Those pieces of evidence coupled with Musk’s ownership and high-level roles in these companies compel the Court to this holding.
And
As mentioned, the record also provides specific reasons to believe Musk may be Plaintiffs’ conducting business on his other email accounts. For example, xAI’s CFO sent xAI financial updates to Musk’s SpaceX email address. That alone is sufficient to compel discovery here because X and xAI have the right to obtain documents when a CEO uses non-company email accounts to conduct company business—whether those are personal email accounts or not is not dispositive.
Judge Pittman didn’t establish a deadline for the production of these emails.
During the May 13 hearing, Judge Ray asked X and xAI’s lawyers how long they would take to produce these emails, to which the legal team replied they didn’t know exactly, adding that “it would take a little bit of time, but we’d move as quickly as possible, if so ordered.”
Worth checking out on Amazon
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
