
Where I’m from, you sue somebody, be it a company or an individual, if there’s a reason.
It means something, usually serious, happened.
But it seems to me that, in the US, lawsuits are just a form of communication.
A good example of this is the way Elon Musk keeps filing lawsuits against OpenAI and Sam Altman.
I get it in principle, but I don’t understand the back and forth.
A while back, Elon Musk sued OpenAI and Sam Altman because Musk says what they’re doing contradicts the founding principles of the company.
Musk has often been very vocal about it, and there’s a famous video where he uses a simile that’s perhaps exaggerated but on point.
“It does seem weird that something can be a non-profit, open-source, and turn itself into a for-profit, closed-source,” Musk said.
“It’s like, let’s say you founded an organization to save the Amazon rainforest, and instead they became a lumber company and chopped down the forest, and sold it for money.”
However, Musk apparently dropped the first lawsuit, and now he’s sued OpenAI again, for (nearly) the same thing.
In the lawsuit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, Musk claims that OpenAI has breached its funding agreement, and that it has become a ‘closed-source de facto subsidiary’ of Microsoft.
The only thing I can think of is that Musk’s legal team thought they have a better chance with this new lawsuit, which is very similar to the old one, for some technicalities that regular people, ie people who don’t speak Legalese, can’t fathom.
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