The California judge for Elon Musk’s racketeering lawsuit against Sam Altman granted the Tesla CEO a small legal victory Tuesday, but not before dinging both sides for trying to waste her time with “excessive” court filings.
“The court will not waste precious judicial resources on the parties’ gamesmanship,” US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote.
“Here, the parties to this action have repeatedly over-litigated this case,” she wrote.
The judge’s terse, two-page decision grants Musk’s request that she trim Altman’s bulky response to the bulky, 2024 lawsuit, which accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of civil racketeering, fraud, breach of contract, and violating antitrust laws.
Altman’s lawyers responded by filing a list of 55 “affirmative defenses.” (Affirmative defenses are to be proven at trial by the defense.)
Filing 55 affirmative defenses was an overblown response on Altman’s part, Gonzalez Rogers wrote Tuesday, agreeing with Musk’s lawyers on that point.
“Plaintiffs are correct that defendants have inappropriately asserted an excessive number of defenses, many of which appear to be irrelevant, redundant, insufficient or immaterial,” she agreed.
But Musk’s lawyers answered Altman’s excessiveness with still more excess, she said.
Musk’s side “failed to take the high road, instead moving to strike all of the asserted defenses,” the judge wrote Tuesday. “They too over-reached.”
It’s not the first time Gonzalez Rogers voiced her impatience with the two clashing tech titans. At a court hearing in February, she said she was skeptical of Musk’s claim of irreparable financial harm, noting that this was a case of “billionaires versus billionaires.”
“How can I say, as a matter of law, there is a likely restraint of trade when your client has raised $11 billion” for rival xAI, she asked then.
Lawyers for Altman had hoped to defend all 55 affirmative responses at an August court hearing, but Gonzalez Rogers cut things short Tuesday, trimming their number down by 16.
These 16 were “plainly insufficiently alleged, irrelevant, redundant or immaterial,” she said.
They include Altman’s assertion that the lawsuit should be tossed out because its claims are too old, that it was brought with “unreasonable delay,” and that it is voided by “Musk’s unclean hands,” a reference to alleged misconduct that was left unspecified.
Altman’s 55 defenses were “untethered,” Musk’s side had countered in a filing last month, “to any coherent legal theory, facts, or cause of action.”
In their July 10 filing, Altman disagreed and called Musk’s attempt to strike all 55 defenses “nothing more than a tactical maneuver” to delay turning over evidence in the case.
Musk is accusing Altman’s OpenAI of abandoning its “not for profit” origins and raking in millions through a self-dealing “unregulated merger” with Microsoft. He seeks monetary damages and a judgment voiding OpenAI and Microsoft’s licensing agreement.
Altman’s side denies Musk’s allegations in their entirety and seeks to fight them at trial using the surviving 39 defenses. Gonzalez Rogers has set a March 30 date for jury selection in her Oakland, California courtroom.
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