NextFin News - Newly unsealed court documents from March 2026 have revealed that U.S. President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leader, Elon Musk, personally lobbied Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to join a hostile $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI’s intellectual property. The revelation, emerging from the ongoing legal battle between Musk and OpenAI in an Oakland federal court, provides the first concrete evidence of a brief, high-stakes alliance between the two tech titans who had previously spent years in a public feud that once threatened to devolve into a literal cage match.
The unredacted text messages, dated February 3, 2025, show Zuckerberg initiating contact by offering to use Meta’s moderation teams to protect DOGE personnel from "doxxing or threatening" content. Musk responded within thirty minutes, pivoting the conversation from government efficiency to corporate conquest. "Are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others?" Musk wrote, according to the filings. Zuckerberg’s response—"Want to discuss live?"—suggests a level of strategic coordination that far exceeded the public’s understanding of their relationship at the time. While OpenAI’s subsequent filings in August 2025 confirmed that Meta did not ultimately sign the letter of intent, the documents underscore the lengths to which Musk went to prevent OpenAI’s transition into a fully for-profit entity.
The timing of the pitch is critical. Just one week after these texts, a consortium led by Musk’s xAI submitted its unsolicited $97.4 billion offer to acquire the nonprofit organization controlling OpenAI. The bid was a tactical maneuver designed to freeze OpenAI’s assets and block CEO Sam Altman from completing a restructuring that would grant Microsoft and other investors greater equity control. By attempting to bring Zuckerberg into the fold, Musk sought to create a "united front" of Silicon Valley’s most powerful independent players against the Microsoft-OpenAI alliance. However, the documents show that Zuckerberg remained cautious, likely wary of the antitrust scrutiny that a Meta-xAI-OpenAI consolidation would inevitably trigger.
Dan Ives, a senior equity analyst at Wedbush Securities who has long maintained a "tactically bullish" stance on the AI sector, noted that while the bid failed, it highlighted the "desperation and strategic urgency" defining the AI arms race. Ives, whose views are often seen as a bellwether for tech investor sentiment but are occasionally criticized for being overly optimistic about valuation multiples, argued that Musk’s attempt to recruit Zuckerberg was less about the money and more about "denying the crown jewels to Redmond." This perspective, however, is not a universal consensus. Some legal analysts suggest the bid was primarily a litigation tactic intended to bolster Musk’s claim that OpenAI had abandoned its founding mission, rather than a serious attempt at an acquisition.
From a market standpoint, the revelation of these private negotiations adds a layer of complexity to Meta’s own AI strategy. While Zuckerberg declined to join Musk’s bid, his willingness to "discuss live" indicates that Meta was at least briefly considering a more aggressive posture toward OpenAI’s intellectual property. This contradicts the prevailing narrative that Meta is solely committed to its "open-source" Llama path. The risk for Meta, as noted in the court filings, was that any formal involvement in a hostile takeover of a competitor could have invited a fresh wave of regulatory intervention from the Federal Trade Commission, which has historically viewed Zuckerberg’s acquisition history with skepticism.
The legal proceedings are now moving toward a critical juncture, with jury selection scheduled to begin on April 27, 2026. OpenAI’s legal team has used these unsealed texts to argue that Musk’s lawsuit is not a "principled stand for humanity," but a "commercial power grab" disguised as a mission-driven crusade. They point to the $97.4 billion bid as evidence that Musk himself was willing to "privatize" the very assets he claims should remain public. As the trial approaches, the focus will likely shift from these high-level text exchanges to the specific contractual obligations Musk claims were breached during OpenAI’s 2015 founding.
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