A federal judge said on Tuesday that parts of Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI to halt its conversion to a for-profit entity might go to trial, adding that the Tesla CEO will have to appear in court and testify.
"Something is going to trial in this case," U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, said early in the court session.
"(Elon Musk will) sit on the stand, present it to a jury, and a jury will decide who is right."
Rogers was considering Musk's recent request for a preliminary injunction to block OpenAI's conversion before going to trial, the latest move in a grudge match between the world's richest person and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that is playing out publicly in court.
The last time Rogers provided a preliminary injunction was in Epic Games' case against Apple in May 2021.
Musk cofounded OpenAI with Altman in 2015, but left before the company took off and subsequently founded the competing AI startup xAI in 2023.
OpenAI is now trying to transition from a nonprofit into a for-profit entity, which it says it needs to do to secure the capital required to develop the best artificial intelligence models.
Last year, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, saying that OpenAI’s founders originally approached him to fund a nonprofit focused on developing AI to benefit humanity, but that it is now focused on making money.
He later expanded the lawsuit to add federal antitrust and other claims, and in December asked the judge presiding over the case to stop OpenAI from transitioning to a for-profit.
In response to Musk’s lawsuit, OpenAI has said it will move to dismiss Musk’s claims and that Musk “should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom.”
The stakes on OpenAI's corporate transition have now escalated, as OpenAI’s last fundraising round of $6.6 billion and a new round of up to $25 billion under discussion with SoftBank are conditioned on the company restructuring to remove the nonprofit’s control.
Such a restructuring would be highly unusual, said Rose Chan Loui, executive director of the UCLA Law Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofits. Nonprofit conversions to for-profits have historically been for health care organizations like hospitals, not venture capital-backed companies, she said.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-openai-head-court-173346402.html
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would be willing to meet with his Iranian counterpart to try to persuade Iran to give up what the United States believes are Tehran's efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.
Trump also said Iran is too close to having a nuclear weapon and that the United States has the right to block the sale of Iranian oil to other nations.
He spoke to reporters as he signed what he called a "very tough" directive restoring his maximum pressure campaign on Iran.
He also signed a document to stop U.S. engagement with the United Nations Human Rights Council and continue a halt to funding for the U.N. Palestinian relief agency UNRWA.
Shares of companies developing psychedelic treatments jumped while those of vaccine makers slipped after a Senate committee advanced the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.
The controversial nominee has previously said he believes psychedelic drugs could be useful therapeutics and should be decriminalized.
Shares of Mind Medicine, the company better known as MindMed that is working on an LSD-based treatment for anxiety, were up 7.3% at $7.91 on Tuesday. Shares of Compass Pathways, which is developing a psilocybin product for depression, rose 9.9% to $4.74. Shares of ATAI Life Sciences, another developer of psychedelic therapies, surged 21% to $2.25.
Kennedy has been a vocal skeptic of vaccines and repeatedly made false claims that they cause autism. He has refused to walk the claim back even at the urging of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.). Cassidy said he struggled with Kennedy's past comments on vaccines but nonetheless cast the deciding vote in favor of his nomination.
Shares of Moderna were down 5.2% to $34.65 while shares of Pfizer dropped 2% to $25.67, despite the company reporting better-than-expected fourth-quarter results Tuesday.
Shares of Novavax and BioNTech, two more vaccine companies, were down about 1% each.
A full Senate vote to confirm Kennedy hasn't been scheduled yet. He can afford to lose up to three Republican votes if all Democrats oppose him.
El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele has offered to "house in his jails dangerous American criminals" and accept deportees of any nationality, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday night.
“We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” President Nayib Bukele said in a statement on X.
He added that he’d take the deportees “for a fee” and house them in a megaprison known for hosting gang members.
"We are willing to take in only convicted criminals (including convicted U.S. citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable."
Rubio called Bukele's offer "an act of extraordinary friendship", adding that:
"No country's ever made an offer of friendship such as this."
Of course, there are plenty who dislike this idea - our 'most dangerous criminals' deserve better... apparently?
There would be serious legal hurdles to sending American citizens abroad, according to analysts including Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
“I don’t care what Bukele says, the United States cannot legally banish Americans — such authorities died centuries ago,” Reichlin-Melnick said in a social media post.
A State Department advisory says El Salvador's prison and detention center conditions are "harsh and dangerous," while overcrowding "constitutes a serious threat to prisoners' health and lives."
Latino advocacy group the Board of the League of United Latin American Citizens called the deal "a sad day for America," per CNN.
LULAC "opposes treating deported non-criminal migrants like cattle who can be shuttled from one country to another without regard to their home of origin," added Roman Palomares, the group's national president and chair.
While Bukele’s anti-crime strategy transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America to among the safest, his strategy has attracted criticism from human rights groups.
In 2022, Amnesty International said “El Salvadoran authorities have committed massive human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, as well as torture and ill-treatment.”
“A country that was once known for violence and for the inability to live openly and freely with one’s family and enjoy life has now become one of the most secure in the hemisphere thanks to his leadership, to the difficult decisions that had to be made,” Rubio said alongside El Salvadoran Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill in the capital, San Salvador, on Monday.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on a tour of Latin America, praised the offer as unprecedented without saying whether the Trump administration would accept it - or whether it would even be legal to do so in the case of US citizens.
“More details will be forthcoming,” he said.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/el-salvador-offers-imprison-americas-dangerous-criminals-fee
Apparently President Donald Trump's 'Victory Plan' for Ukraine will involve the war-ravaged country agreeing to grant the US unprecedented access to its rare earth elements in a more 'equitable' quid pro quo.
He told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that "We’re handing them money hand over fist. We’re giving them equipment" - in reference to the Zelensky government, strongly suggesting they need to give something more in return. "We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine, where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things," he told reporters in the Oval Office.
"I want to have security of rare earth," he added in reference rare earth elements, which has also been hotly sought after by other great industrial technology powers like China and Russia.
They are found in small deposits but have a huge variety of applications. These rare elements are useful in everything from electronics to defense systems to health care to batteries to clean energy. China has long had unrivaled dominance in the rare earth market, but others are catching up, and it appears Trump has set this as a priority of sorts.
The Hill notes of Trump's comments, however, that "It’s not clear whether Trump’s desired deal would refer only to the elements that are considered rare earths, or if he is also interested in minerals like lithium and titanium, of which Ukraine has a significant supply."
The Zelensky government may actually be considering it, per FT:
A person close to Zelenskyy told the Financial Times that Trump’s remarks “seem to align with the ‘victory plan’ presented to him in the fall”. The person said Ukraine had offered Trump “special terms” for co-operation on key resources, stressing the need to protect them from Russia and Iran. “Of course, we are ready to work with America,” the person added.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called Trump’s rare earth metals demand to Ukraine "an offer to purchase aid."
"Well, probably, if we call a spade a spade, this is an offer to buy aid, that is, not to continue to provide it on a gratuitous or other basis, but to provide it on a commercial basis," he told reporters in Moscow on Tuesday. "It is better, of course, not to provide assistance at all and thereby contribute to the end of the conflict."
The only problem for Kiev and Washington is that the bulk of Ukraine’s main rare earth deposits are currently under Russian occupation in the territories annexed by Moscow...
This is not the first time such a controversial plan has been floated. Late last year US Senator Lindsey Graham kept repeating the demand to gain access to Ukraine's resources in media appearances.
Lavrov had blasted the plan at the time, and said it shows what Washington is really after: "It is no coincidence that US Senator Lindsey Graham said outright (he is not a diplomat and does not hide his thoughts), that the US needs to ensure that Russia suffer a defeat in Ukraine, because there are many rare-earth metals, including lithium," the top Russian diplomat said in November. "He said so to Vladimir Zelensky when he visited him recently. He said that the US needs these riches. And he added that they would help Ukraine and in return they would take all this from it as payback," Lavrov added.
As of Tuesday morning, The Washington Post writes that Ukraine welcomes Trump offer for its minerals in trade for military support, citing Ukrainian officials who say Kiev is ready to work with Trump's business-like approach.
We've noted before that China alone accounts for 85-90 percent of the world’s rare earth mine-to-metal refining. What’s more, Chinese refineries supply 68 percent of the world’s cobalt, 65 percent of nickel, and 60 percent of EV-battery-grade lithium. As a result, a whopping 75 percent of all EV batteries are made in China.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ukraine-open-trump-demand-exchange-rare-earth-elements-arms
Days after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio blasted the Panamanian government for allowing Chinese "influence and control" over the Panama Canal and called for "immediate changes," a new report suggests that discussions are underway with President José Raúl Mulino's administration to end Chinese-backed port deals.
Bloomberg reports that the Mulino administration is considering canceling critical port contracts held by Hong Kong-based Hutchison Ports PPC, a subsidiary of CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd. The report cites sources familiar with the discussions.
If the deals are canceled, the move by Panama could serve as a major concession to ease President Donald Trump's concerns over China's influence at strategic ports near the canal—an issue he has called a national security threat.
During a visit Sunday to Panama, Rubio told Mulino and other Panamanian government officials not to renew its deal with China's Belt and Road economic program. Following the meeting, Panama promised free passage for US warships and said it would withdraw from China's BRI program.
"Trump has made a preliminary determination that the current position of influence and control of the Chinese Communist Party over the Panama Canal area is a threat to the canal," said US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce on Sunday.
Trump Effect Continues: Panama Bends The Knee, Will Not Renew "Silk Road" Deal With China After Rubio Visit https://t.co/lIv8ySTMvF
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 3, 2025
Also on Sunday, Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland: "We're going to take it back, or something very powerful is going to happen."
Rubio has warned that Beijing could leverage the ports to disrupt the global shipping channel, posing a risk to critical US supply chains. He also claimed that China could use the ports as staging points in future military operations.
Shifting the focus to CK Hutchison Holdings and its potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party, an analysis of public records shows several key risk factors, including forced labor concerns and high political exposure to state-owned enterprises.
Here's the upstream ownership profile of CK Hutchison Holdings. Notice some familiar names?
Here is more color on those direct owners and shareholders of the HK-based holdings company.
If Panama bends the knee to Trump, like Mexico and Canada, on border security, then this would be another win for the 'America First' agenda.
Trudeau Bends The Knee: Canada Will Send 10,000 Troops To Border, Name Fentanyl Czar To Delay Trump Tariffshttps://t.co/eYHZctzoIn pic.twitter.com/3fwXeUFwDa
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 3, 2025
Beyond concerns over canal security, Trump admin folks should scrutinize CK Hutchison Holdings' direct owners and shareholders. We did the first leg of FININT above...
