Two of Elon Musk's companies are suing Apple and Open AI, accusing them of hurting competition in artificial intelligence.

The lawsuit filed by XAI and Musk's social media platform X, alleges Apple and OpenAI have colluded to maintain monopolies in the smartphone and gen AI markets.

Open AI now giving an official statement this morning saying this latest filing is consistent with Mr.

Musk's ongoing pattern of harassment. Joining us to discuss the fallout, Wall Street Journal

columnist and CNBC contributor Tim Higgins is with us, Tim. It's great to see you.

Tim's got a new book coming out the next month called I-WR, which explores the backstory of tensions

between Apple

and Musk in particular. I guess today, Tim, is a sort of a day you've seen coming for a while.

Yeah, absolutely. This is a huge, huge deal for Apple. Set aside the merits of the lawsuit. This is

about optics. This is about politics. The real threat for Apple here is that Musk drags its relationship of Open AI into the public square and further highlights Apple's control of that digital world that it holds.

It's under pressure in Europe, under pressure here in the states of the DOJ,

under pressure multiple governments around the world, its control to the iPhone world that it created years ago.

And with the bigger thing in the background that's going on here is this fight in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco where I am

over kind of the gateway to the next digital frontier that AI kind of holds this promise.

Is it going to be through the iPhone smartphone way that we have been doing and accessing digital?

Or has Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are kind of portraying or kind of putting this vision out there,

a new device that's going to be this kind of supercomputer way to get to that digital world.

That's kind of the backstory of what's going on.

You mentioned optics and politics.

We know sort of the tension that's existed at least this year between Musk and the president. And we know

the efforts Apple has made to get back into his good graces with its commitment to manufacturing

here and the visit to the Oval a couple of weeks ago. Does that necessarily give one side an edge?

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