Judge orders Elon Musk to reveal his secret Apple settlement

A federal judge has ordered Elon Musk’s companies to hand over any agreement they reached with Apple before dropping their antitrust claims against it.

Judge Mark Pittman, who sits in Fort Worth, Texas, directed X Corp and SpaceXAI on Wednesday to produce the documents for his review. He acted after OpenAI, the remaining defendant, moved to compel disclosure of whatever passed between Musk’s side and Apple.

The two companies filed on Sept. 14 to dismiss their claims against Apple with prejudice, meaning they can never bring them again. They gave no reason, said nothing about whether money changed hands, and confirmed only that the case against OpenAI continues. Apple did not object.

OpenAI says it knows nothing about it. In its own filing it told the court it was not party to any agreement, does not know the terms, and wants them disclosed because they could affect the claims still running against it.

What the case alleges is that two companies carved up a market together. X Corp and the business then called X.AI sued in Fort Worth on Aug. 25, 2025, accusing Apple and OpenAI of being two monopolists joining forces to ensure their continued dominance, under the Sherman Act and Texas antitrust law, and demanding billions in damages before a jury.

The specific complaint was exclusivity. Apple decided in June 2024 to build ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence as the only assistant on the iPhone, which Musk’s lawyers argued handed OpenAI hundreds of millions of devices and shut out competitors including his own Grok. The filing claimed ChatGPT holds at least 80% of the generative chatbot market against a few percent for Grok.

It also accused Apple of rigging its shop window. Grok ranked second in the App Store’s productivity category and X ranked first in news, the complaint said, yet neither appeared in the Must-Have Apps section where ChatGPT was featured.

Pittman let the case proceed in November 2025, rejecting attempts by both Apple and OpenAI to have it thrown out, while noting that his order should not be read as any judgment on the merits.

Something changed in the ten months since. Apple has reportedly signed an agreement this year to integrate Google’s artificial intelligence into its products, which would undercut the central claim that ChatGPT enjoys exclusivity on the iPhone.

The lawyers who signed the dismissal came from Axinn, Brown Pruitt Wambsganss Dean Forman & Moore, and Stone Hilton.

Musk is the world’s richest man and now controls both sides of the plaintiff. X Corp is the company formerly known as Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion in 2022, and SpaceXAI is the artificial intelligence business he founded as xAI in 2023.

The remaining defendants are OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI LLC and OpenAI OpCo.