The parties reported the deal in a court filing on Wednesday, jointly requesting the US appeals court in San Francisco to postpone an upcoming hearing to allow time to settle the paperwork.

Some workers sued the company over their terminations and severance packages, after some 6,000 staff – more than half its workforce – were sacked as part of a cost-cutting measure after Musk took over the company in 2022.

The BBC has contacted X – formerly called Twitter – and the lawyers representing the employees for comment.

“The parties have reached a settlement agreement in principle and began negotiating the terms of a long-form settlement agreement,” according to court documents filed by both sides, seen by the BBC.

Details of the agreement are not yet public and will require the courts’ approval.

The lawsuit, led by former Twitter employee Courtney McMillian, says about 6,000 people were wrongly denied benefits under the company’s severance plan.

They argued that the firm had failed to provide payments as high as six months’ worth of salaries, among other terms.

But Twitter only gave sacked workers at most one month of severance pay, while some did not receive anything, according to the lawsuit.

Musk axed thousands of Twitter staff globally, downsizing the platform’s trust and safety, human rights and media teams.

The Twitter layoffs was among the earliest in a series of retrenchments among tech firms to cut costs. Rank-and-file workers were often first to be laid off.

Many companies had gone on a hiring spree during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic when the use of digital tools grew.

Companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft laid off tens of thousands of workers in the years that followed.

Musk, who was appointed for several months to helm President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, made similar moves when he axed thousands of federal workers earlier this year.

The department was tasked with reducing US government spending and cutting jobs.

Source: BBC

He called OpenAI boss Sam Altman a “liar” – after Altman claimed Musk used his platform to “benefit himself and his own companies”.

The row is the latest flashpoint in what is an ongoing feud between the billionaires who co-founded OpenAI – but now fiercely compete after Musk left the firm.

Apple announced a partnership with ChatGPT in June 2024 – but there is no suggestion Apple favours one app over the other, and several rival AI apps such as DeepSeek and Perplexity have topped the App Store charts since then.

The BBC has approached Apple for comment

In a later post Musk took aim at Apple again, asking the firm why it would not promote X – or its AI app Grok – in the “Must Have” section of the App Store.

“X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps,” he said in a post now pinned to his X profile.

ChatGPT is currently the most downloaded free app in the UK, with Grok a close third. X does not make the top 40.

This seemed to draw the attention of Altman, who linked to a report by tech newsletter Platformer which claimed Musk had made his own personal X posts more prominent in people’s feeds.

Bad blood

The feud between Musk and Altman has, over time, encompassed a slew of lawsuits, email dumps and social media digs.

Their rivalry can be traced back a decade, with Musk’s now public belief that OpenAI, under Altman’s leadership, abandoned the principles he and others used to found it in 2015.

The firm was created with the intention of building artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI that can perform any task that a human being is capable of – but by making its technology open-source and promising to “benefit humanity”.

• What is AI and how does it work?

OpenAI was also set up as a not-for-profit company, meaning it would not aim to make money, but in 2019 it established a for-profit arm which Musk felt was antithetical to its original mission.

Musk argued in his March 2024 lawsuit that the firm had instead been focusing on “maximising profits” for its major investor Microsoft.

And while he unexpectedly dropped his lawsuit last year, OpenAI then filed a counter-suit against him in April.

It claimed the X owner had engaged “non-stop” in “bad-faith tactics” to try and slow down the company’s AI development.

OpenAI has also claimed Musk is not motivated by preserving the company’s founding mission – but rather by his “own agenda”.

And the feud has not stopped at just words and legal action. In February, Musk made a shock move to try and buy the company for $100bn (£74bn) – a bid rejected by OpenAI’s board.

Source: BBC

Announced on Monday by Musk’s company xAI, the $200m (£149m) contract is part of its “Grok for Government” programme, and aligns with the Trump administration’s push for more aggressive adoption of artificial intelligence.

It comes just days after Grok sparked backlash for spouting antisemitic posts, including praise for Adolf Hitler on X, the social media platform owned by Musk.

Musk said the bot was “too compliant” and “too eager to please”. He said the issue was being addressed.

Musk’s xAI says the new deal will give US government departments access to Grok 4, the latest version of the chatbot, and offer custom tools for national security use.

The company also plans to provide technical support for classified environments.

The Pentagon also announced awarding similar contracts to Anthropic, Google and OpenAI – each with a $200m ceiling.

“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” said the administration’s Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty.

• Musk says Grok chatbot was ‘manipulated’ into praising Hitler
• What is AI and how does it work?

Musk’s expanding government partnerships come amid a deteriorating relationship with President Donald Trump.

The Tesla and SpaceX boss had spent a quarter of a billion dollars on Trump’s re-election effort in 2024, and actively campaigned for him.

He was later appointed to run the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – a federal cost-cutting initiative tasked with reducing the size of the US government.

But in recent months, Musk began openly criticising what Trump had dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill”, a sprawling spending and tax cuts legislation that the Tesla boss said was too costly for Americans.

Musk resigned from his post at Doge in May, though the department has not been officially disbanded.

Since then, Trump had suggested Doge could be deployed to harm Musk’s companies.

Trump also suggested he might deport Musk, who is an American citizen and was born in South Africa. He also holds Canadian citizenship.

While at the helm of Doge, the White House was criticised for allowing Musk to have unfettered access to troves of government data on American citizens.

Despite the fallout, Musk’s xAI has continued to expand its government work. Its newly-announced contract may also create an avenue for that data collection to continue.

Grok was introduced in late 2023 as a more unfiltered alternative to other AI chatbots like ChatGPT. It is already integrated into Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Source: BBC

The announcement came after the platform’s Grok AI chatbot shared multiple comments that were widely criticised by users.

“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,” the company said in a post.

According to media reports, Grok made multiple positive references to Hitler this week when queried about posts that appeared to celebrate the deaths of children in the recent Texas floods.

In response to a question asking “which 20th century historical figure” would be best suited to deal with such posts, Grok said: “To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question.”

“If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the mustache,” said another Grok response. “Truth hurts more than floods.”

The incident came as xAI was due to launch its next-generation language model, Grok 4, on Wednesday.

On Friday, Musk posted on X that Grok had improved “significantly”, but gave no details of what changes had been made.

“You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,” he added.

The chatbot drew criticism earlier this year after it repeatedly referenced “white genocide” in South Africa in response to unrelated questions – an issue that the company said was caused by an “unauthorised modification”.

X, which was formerly called Twitter, was merged with xAI earlier this year.

Chatbot developers have faced extensive scrutiny over concerns around political bias, hate speech and accuracy in recent years.

Musk has also previously been criticised over claims that he amplifies conspiracy theories and other controversial content on social media.

Source: BBC

US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer issued a preliminary injunction on Saturday to prohibit access, ordering Musk and his team to immediately destroy any copies of records.

The move comes after 19 state attorneys general sued the Trump administration after Doge, a cost-cutting initiative led by Musk, was given access to the records.

They argued access for Musk, a “special government employee”, and Doge, which is not an official government department, violated federal law.

There was no immediate comment from the White House, President Donald Trump or Musk.

The Democratic state attorneys general sued Trump, the Treasury Department and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday.

Engelmayer’s order, issued early on Saturday, said the states would “face irreparable” harm without immediate relief.

“That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” the order read.

The order restrains the defendants from granting access to Treasury Department records containing personally identifiable or confidential information to special government employees, political appointees, and other employees from outside the department.

The injunction restricts anyone else from accessing those records other than civil servants who need to do so for their work at the Bureau of Fiscal Services and have passed background checks.

The judge further ordered any person among those restricted to immediately destroy copies of records.

The conditions will remain in place until the next court hearing on 14 February.

Tech titan and billionaire Musk has been heavily involved in upheaval during Trump’s second term, with Doge leading major cuts at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which distributes billions of dollars of aid globally.