Elon Musk's X and SpaceXAI just walked away from their antitrust case against Apple — and ordinary Americans who pay the price for Big Tech collusion deserve to know what they got in return.
Last week, Musk's companies filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss all claims against Apple "with prejudice," meaning they can never sue over the same allegations again. The claims against OpenAI? Still very much alive. The filing says only that the parties have "resolved their claims" against Apple. Apple doesn't oppose the motion. Nobody is explaining what "resolved" means — whether cash changed hands, whether Apple made concessions on App Store rankings, or whether Musk simply decided the fight wasn't worth losing.
The original lawsuit, filed in 2025, accused Apple and OpenAI of teaming up to crush rival AI companies. The core allegation: Apple's deal to integrate ChatGPT into Siri and Apple Intelligence gave OpenAI a monopoly on billions of iPhone user prompts, while Apple allegedly manipulated App Store rankings to keep ChatGPT on top. As Gizmodo reported, Musk's suit argued the partnership made ChatGPT "the only generative AI chatbot that benefits from billions of user prompts originating from hundreds of millions of iPhones." Apple denied wrongdoing and insisted the OpenAI partnership was never exclusive.
So what shifted? Ars Technica reported that this summer, a court ordered Apple to hand over internal documents during discovery. The timing suggests Musk may have gotten whatever intelligence he needed from Apple's files — then cut the iPhone maker loose with a permanent dismissal rather than risk hitting the same procedural wall that killed his earlier lawsuit against OpenAI over its nonprofit origins. In that case, a jury unanimously found Musk waited too long to sue; they never ruled his claims were wrong, just late.
Then there's the curious matter of Apple's own fight with OpenAI. As Gizmodo noted, Apple recently sued OpenAI for stealing trade secrets — and Musk wasted no time gloating, posting "Scam Altman strikes again." The enemy of my enemy, it turns out, gets a pass on antitrust.
OpenAI, for its part, has mocked Musk's market-share claims as "back-of-the-envelope math" — he told the court the Apple deal foreclosed anywhere from zero to 55 percent of the chatbot market. OpenAI also started publicly griping that Apple buried the ChatGPT integration so deep in iOS that users couldn't find it, costing OpenAI billions in expected subscriptions. So much for that monopoly.
The real question isn't whether OpenAI is a monopolist or just a competitor Musk hasn't beaten yet. It's whether any of these billionaires' legal wars actually open the market for the rest of us — or just reshuffle which oligarchs hold the cards. Apple walks free. OpenAI stays in the dock. And nobody's explaining the terms of the deal that let the world's most valuable company off the hook.
Judge Mark Pittman still has to approve the dismissal. Don't hold your breath waiting for transparency on what Apple gave up — or didn't — to make this go away.
