Musk Loses Lawsuit | Rewire News Daily

The jury rejected Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI in two hours, Trump paused Iran strike in 48-hour window, Meta to lay off 8,000 employees on Wednesday. AI companies are accelerating their cash-ins, while geopolitics and organizations are accelerating their resets.

1｜Musk Loses Lawsuit Against OpenAI in Two Hours, Trillion-Dollar IPO's Biggest Obstacle Disappears

In less than two hours, nine jurors at the Oakland Federal Court reached a unanimous decision that Musk's lawsuit was filed too late. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the ruling on the spot, dismissing the two charges of breaching charitable trust and unjust enrichment. Musk's lawyer stated the intention to appeal, while Musk himself claimed on Truth Social that this was a "calendar technology issue."

The ostensible aim of the lawsuit was a $134 billion compensation and the dismissal of Ultraman, but the real battleground was never in the courtroom. Musk admitted during the trial that he had attempted to acquire a 50% stake in OpenAI for $1 billion and was rejected. He sought to regain influence over a company he could not control through legal means. The direct consequence of the loss is the removal of the biggest legal risk for OpenAI before its IPO. Previously valued at $300 billion, the FT headline directly stated, "The fate of the trillion-dollar IPO is in the hands of the Oakland jury." The difficulty of overturning the factual findings on appeal makes it unlikely that the IPO timetable will be delayed.

On the same day, Musk expressed his desire to "quickly" move forward with the SpaceX IPO. Musk, who lost to OpenAI, is accelerating the cash-in of his most valuable chips.

(Source: TechCrunch / Wired / Fortune / Axios / CNN / NPR)

2｜Trump Suspends Iran Strike Plan, Gulf Nations Intervene to Secure 48-Hour Window (Continued from Yesterday's Report)

Trump stated on Monday that he had originally planned to launch a strike against Iran "tomorrow," but decided to pause at the request of several Arab leaders from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, providing a "two to three-day" window for negotiations. Previously, the White House believed that the updated proposal submitted by Iran on Sunday was not comprehensive enough, with officials and intelligence sources telling Axios that the expectation of a return to war is continuously rising within the White House.

Iran's position is also hardening. The Foreign Ministry spokesperson publicly stated that the right to nuclear enrichment is "non-negotiable," directly defining the red line. Pakistan, as an intermediary, has conveyed proposals from both sides, and former U.S. negotiator with Iran Rob Malley told Al Jazeera that the current negotiations have a "very low chance of success" and warned that Trump is stepping into a "Vietnam trap."

Yesterday's Rewire wrote that Gulf state mediation is a new variable. Today's signal is clearer: it's not a question of "whether to strike," but "under what conditions not to strike." Iran is not backing down on its nuclear plan, Trump is not accepting a face-saving agreement, and all the Gulf states can buy is time.

(Source: Axios / Al Jazeera / NPR)

3｜Meta to Lay Off 8,000, Shift 7,000 to AI Roles on May 20, Reinvents Team Structure with "Pods"

Meta is set to carry out its largest layoff of the year on May 20, with around 8,000 layoffs and a further 7,000 employees transitioning from non-AI roles to AI-related functions, affecting a total of 10% of its workforce. Reuters exclusively obtained internal documents detailing the restructuring plan.

Of particular note is the introduction of the "Pod" model to replace traditional teams. WSJ reports that Meta is embedding AI agents into work teams, with each "Pod" task being accomplished by a small number of humans collaborating with AI. This move aligns with Anthropic's acquisition of Stainless, as AI companies redefine the concept of a "team." Meta's AI capital expenditure budget ranges from $115 billion to $135 billion, with Zuckerberg making the most aggressive bet on AI among tech giants. Leopold Aschenbrenner's Superintelligence Labs, a former OpenAI researcher, secured $13.6 billion in funding and directly purchased computing power from cryptocurrency mines. The resource race of AI armament is spilling over into every corner with idle computing power.

(Source: NYT / CNBC / Reuters / WSJ / CoinDesk)

4｜NextEra Acquires Dominion for $67 Billion, Kickstarting the Power Race of the AI Era

NextEra Energy has announced the all-stock acquisition of Dominion Energy, in a deal valued at $67 billion, creating the world's largest regulated power company. CEO John Ketchum stated in an analyst call that the acquisition is aimed at creating a "sufficiently large player" to meet the rapidly expanding power demand.

Virginia, the heart of the U.S. data center alley, falls under Dominion's territory. The merged company will possess a customer pipeline of around 130GW, directly catering to AI companies' thirst for power. Bloomberg coined it the "new era of mega-mergers," as the energy industry begins responding to the demand for AI infrastructure through mergers and acquisitions. Regulatory approvals are expected to take 12 to 18 months, with reviews by the Virginia and Florida utility commissions and federal scrutiny, with each milestone becoming a market signal.

Last week, Ryanair's CFO warned that the jet fuel crisis could force weaker airlines out of the upcoming winter season. Energy supply constraints are reshaping all industries reliant on electricity and fuel.

(Source: Fortune / Al Jazeera / Axios / Bloomberg / Utility Dive)

5｜Anthropic Acquires Stainless, Choking the Entire AI Industry with SDK Tools

Anthropic has acquired Stainless for approximately $300 million, a New York startup founded in 2022. Stainless's product is an SDK for automated creation and maintenance, with customers including OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare. Post-acquisition, Stainless will gradually sunset its hosted product.

The focus of this deal is not the amount but the positioning. The SDK is the first layer of interaction between developers and APIs, controlling the SDK means controlling the entry point of developer experience. OpenAI's competitors must now either continue using Anthropic's tools or spend time building their own. With Anthropic's annual revenue of $30 billion surpassing OpenAI's $24 billion, this acquisition has moved beyond a follower's stance and is a strategic move by a platform-level player.

On the same day, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic's co-founders will release an AI encyclical with the Pope. Anthropic is simultaneously seizing both the technological stack and moral discourse high grounds.

(Source: TechCrunch / Bloomberg)

6｜Warsh Yet to Be Sworn In as Fed Chair, But the Bond Market Has Presented Him with the First Test

Kevin Warsh will be sworn in as Federal Reserve Chair this Friday. The 30-year Treasury bond yield has risen to 5.11%, the highest since 2007. Wall Street's prominent strategist Ed Yardeni has rarely called for a July rate hike by the Fed to appease the “bond vigilantes,” directly conflicting with the market's mainstream rate cut expectations.

Axios breaks down the pressure into threefold: the Iran conflict causing an energy supply disruption leading to higher oil prices, AI infrastructure investments draining a significant amount of capital, and the continuous expansion of the federal fiscal deficit. These three forces are simultaneously tugging at the bond market. A new study released by New York Fed economists shows that foreign investors hold nearly $69 trillion in U.S. financial assets, eroding the U.S.'s long-standing “interest rate differential advantage,” squeezing the economic space for repayment.

Warsh is not facing a standalone interest rate decision, but a structural dilemma where energy, AI capital demands, and fiscal deficits reinforce each other. The last time the 30-year yield was at this level, the subprime crisis was just a few months away.

(Source: CNBC / Axios / NY Fed / Fortune)

Also Worth Knowing ↓

Bitcoin dropped below $77,000, erasing all gains from May, with over $500 million liquidated. Touching a two-week low, it moved in sync with bond market pressure and risk aversion. (Source: Bloomberg / CoinDesk)

Harvard's endowment fund emptied its entire $87 million Ethereum position a quarter later. It has reduced its crypto holdings for the third consecutive quarter, with Bitcoin holdings further trimmed. The Ivy League's enthusiasm for crypto came and went quickly. (Source: Fortune)

The SEC is considering a tokenized stock framework, deepening Wall Street's tokenization strategy. With regulatory support, the tokenization of stocks is moving from concept to implementation countdown. (Source: CoinDesk / Bloomberg)

Grafana Labs had its source code stolen by hackers, who publicly refused to pay the ransom. As an open-source company, the leverage of ransomware shifted from "open-source code" to "publicly disclosed vulnerability." (Source: TechCrunch)

China's "world's first" offshore wind-powered underwater data center has started operations, with 2,000 servers cooled by seawater. At a 24MW scale, passive seawater cooling combined with offshore wind power supply, offering another form of data center configuration. (Source: Tom's Hardware)

SSD and memory prices hit record highs, with Taiwanese module manufacturers borrowing $880 million just to afford chips. Companies like Adata and TeamGroup are taking on debt to hoard components, as storage supply chain pressures transmit upstream. (Source: Tom's Hardware)

The Pope is set to release the first AI encyclical on May 25, alongside a co-founder of Anthropic. The Vatican is collaborating with Silicon Valley to define an AI ethics narrative, as religious authority steps into the tech governance discourse. (Source: Bloomberg / Reuters)

A data breach at New York City's public healthcare system exposed 1.8 million people's fingerprints and medical records. One of the largest-scale medical data breaches of 2026, once biometric data is leaked, it cannot be reset. (Source: TechCrunch)

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