Anyone still upset that the Musk-Zuck cage match got called off will get a chance to witness a tech billionaire standoff with much higher stakes: a Musk-Altman legal battle. Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its co-founders, CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, yesterday, alleging that they breached the organization’s founding agreement by letting it become too profit-motivated.

Musk’s beef with OpenAI goes way back: He co-founded it in 2015 as a nonprofit alongside Altman and other tech moguls, and alleges he even gave it $44 million of his own cash. But he left OpenAI’s board in 2018 after feeling that it was straying from its goals, according to the filing.

Musk vs. OpenAI

The lawsuit claims that instead of fulfilling its mission to develop AI for the public benefit, the $80 billion company betrayed its original goals by:

• Developing advanced AI for profit (the organization now has a for-profit subsidiary but it’s bound to hew to the nonprofit’s mission), and becoming a “de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.” The tech giant invested $13 billion in OpenAI, buying 49% of its business arm.
• Improperly licensing its GPT-4 AI model to Microsoft despite having an obligation to create such sophisticated tools for nonprofit ends.

The suit asks the court to require OpenAI's research to be public. But some wonder whether Musk might have an ulterior motive in dragging OpenAI to court. Last year, he founded a rival AI startup, the Grok chatbot-maker xAI.

OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon said in an internal memo seen by Bloomberg that the company “categorically disagrees” with Musk’s allegations, and a separate memo from Altman said he missed when Musk competed by just making better tech.

Musk vs. AI

Despite developing AI himself and using it to roast World Economic Forum President Klaus Schwab, Musk has long been wary of rushing the development of the tech. In 2018 he said that AI is “far more dangerous than nukes.”

Last year, Musk was among the hundreds of tech luminaries who signed an open letter calling on all AI labs to pause testing of powerful AI systems for six months. Altman pushed back at the time, saying that OpenAI takes safety into account.

It’s been a rough week for Altman…the Musk lawsuit follows a WSJ report that the SEC is probing whether OpenAI misled investors around his brief ouster as CEO last November.—SK

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US to airdrop aid to Gaza. With the humanitarian crisis in Gaza growing worse amid the Israel–Hamas war, President Biden said the US would begin airdropping humanitarian aid into the area over the coming days. The decision follows an incident where Israeli troops fired on Palestinians approaching an aid convoy, resulting in a skirmish that killed 115 people. Biden also vowed the US would press Israel to allow more aid to enter by land, saying, “We’re going to insist that Israel facilitate more trucks and more routes to get more and more people the help they need.”

Crowds came out for Alexei Navalny’s burial. The Russian opposition leader, who recently died under mysterious circumstances in a remote arctic prison, was laid to rest in Moscow yesterday. Thousands of mourners gathered around the church, where a rushed Eastern Orthodox funeral service took place under tight police control. Prominent opposition politicians, as well as US, German, and French ambassadors to Russia, showed up to pay their respects. People threw flowers along the route of the hearse as crowds accompanied the funeral cortege to a nearby cemetery, where many were heard chanting anti-Putin slogans. Law enforcement detained at least 128 memorial participants across Russia, according to human rights group OVD-Info.

It’s very snowy in California. Storms with fierce winds began dumping snow on the Sierra Nevada on Thursday and are expected to continue through the weekend, with most of the area under a blizzard warning through Sunday. As much as 12 feet has been predicted in the mountains, and the snowfall is likely to snarl travel and create potentially life-threatening conditions. But it will also help shore up the state’s water supply, since the snowpack was at 80% of its average coming into March before the storm began.

Two of the biggest pharmacies in the US will soon start filling prescriptions for abortion pills.

Walgreens and CVS announced yesterday that they received certification to sell mifepristone—the first pill in a two-step regimen used to terminate pregnancy—following a regulatory change by the FDA last year to allow sales in pharmacies.

Walgreens said it will provide the pill as early as next week in states where it’s legal, including select locations in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, California, and Illinois. CVS will sell it Massachusetts and Rhode Island locations in the coming weeks. Neither pharmacy will make the drug available via mail order.

What it means: Medication abortion is the most common method to terminate pregnancy in the US, according to the CDC. Before the FDA changed its regulations last year, mifepristone could only be ordered from a handful of mail-order pharmacies or specially certified clinicians, which made accessing the drug arduous. Now, patients prescribed the drug in states where abortion is legal will be able to obtain it from a pharmacy like any other medication.

But...the future availability of mifepristone will depend on how the Supreme Court rules in a case that challenges this expanded access to the drug. Oral arguments will begin later this month, and a decision is anticipated before the end of June.—CC

Level up your cyber resilience. Your biz’s finances will thank you. Data breaches aren’t cheap—the average data breach cost $4.35m in 2022. To help you save big, we teamed up with Veeam to create an interactive that spills all the deets on data security and financial success. Take a look.

Incredibly, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson really does own your “candy ass.” The actor and former WWE superstar was awarded ownership rights to his famous nickname, along with 24 other phrases and popular insults he used in the ring (“candy ass” included).

Johnson, who first became famous for elbowing people in spandex before he was The Scorpion King, joined the board of directors of TKO Group, which owns WWE, earlier this year. The deal came with a pretty sick lineup of IP: He now owns “If you smell what The Rock is cooking,” “The People’s Elbow,” and of course, calling someone a “roody poo,” among other signature verbal abuses.

Big picture: This deal has more significance than just making a buttoned-up corporate lawyer file paperwork for the word “Jabroni.” Celebrities have increasingly applied for trademark registration to protect their names and catchphrases from showing up on bootleg merch. Johnson gets a cut every time products with his IP are sold.

In the age of personal brands, every utterance is valuable. In October, Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce filed to register his name, social media handle, and several of his sayings, including “Alright Nah.” He was catapulted to global fame last year due to his relationship with Taylor Swift, and now he’s reportedly shopping his podcast around for a potential eight-figure deal.—MM

Stat: The price of food these days may be totally bananas, but actual bananas are one of the rare grocery store purchases that don’t induce inflation-driven sticker shock. The average price of bananas hasn’t risen above 80 cents per pound since 2004, IMF data shows, and Axios calculated that at the current inflation rate, it’d take 210 years for the price to hit $10. What’s keeping the price tag so low? It’s a combination of huge plantations with good growing conditions, low labor costs, trade agreements, and the need for sellers to move the fruits fast before they’re brown and only good for banana bread.

Quote: “Disney stories are filled with heroes and villains. We know who the villains are in this story, and we know they cannot be entrusted with protecting this company’s rich legacy or guiding its bright future.”

There’s a battle raging in Mickey’s kingdom between Disney CEO Bob Iger and activist investor Nelson Peltz—whose Trian Fund Management owns ~$3 billion in Disney stock and wants two board seats—and Walt Disney’s grandchildren (and his brother Roy’s grandchildren) have picked their side. The Disney family members sent two letters to shareholders backing Iger in the fight, saying, “Disney is not a company that makes widgets—it makes magic,” and Iger is “faithful” to that. Casting activist investors as the big bad, one letter called them “wolves in sheep’s clothing” who want to tear the company apart.

Read: A tech billionaire is quietly buying up land in Hawaii. No one knows why. (NPR)