The CEO of Openai challenges his former friend, a company at a time. Twitter, Tesla and even Neuralink are in sight.
OWorm last year, The quarrel between the heavyweights of Silicon Valley, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, has become personal attacks, scalable on social networks and prosecution. Musk calls his enemy the scam Altman and Scunly Sam. Altman said that Musk “cannot be a happy person” and that “his whole life comes from a position of insecurity”. This week, after Musk announced that he was planning to continue Apple for having pretended to promote Altman’s OpenAi on the App Store during his own XAI startup, Altman called Musk to manipulate X for the benefit of himself and his own businesses. “Musk replied by calling Altman a liar.
The two men co -founded Openai as a non -profit organization in 2015 before Musk left the organization’s board of directors three years later following a failed electricity taking. After Openai released Chatgpt to the renown of the public at the end of 2022, Musk founded XAI in March 2023 and promoted it as the alternative “anti-alarm”. Last year, Musk continued Altman to prevent him from transforming Openai into a for -profit entity. Altman made a counterfeit, saying that Musk worked “constantly” for Torpedo Openai.
But the rivalry between Openai and Xai is only a front in the greatest war between Altman and Musk. Altman has made movements, both via Openai and with its own expansive investment portfolio, to develop products and technologies that target several musk companies.
Altman supports a new Brain-Computer interface startup called Merge Labs, which will compete directly with the interface holding of the Brain of Musk Neuralink, the Financial time reported this week. Altman is co -founder of the new company, which seeks to raise capital to an evaluation of $ 850 million. (Oddly, Altman is also a small investor in Neuralink). Musk co -founded Neuralink (recent evaluation: $ 9 billion) in 2016, and is its largest individual shareholder.
Meanwhile, Altman positions Openai to compete directly with Musk’s X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Openai works to build a social media arm which would be a “type X social network”, according to The peniswho reported on these plans for the first time in April. Openai’s push in social networks could potentially constitute a great threat to X. At the last count, X has around 600 million monthly users (by Statita). OPENAI says that the Chatppt is more popular, with 700 million weekly Users.
And Altman also comes after Tesla. Compared to a year earlier, sales of Tesla vehicles dropped by 13.5% in the second quarter of 2025, leading Mush to rotate autonomous taxis as a future potential growth area for its manufacturer of electric vehicles. “My prediction is by the end of next year, we will have hundreds of thousands if not more than a million teslas doing self-clarification in the United States,” said Musk in May CNBC. Maybe. But there is little evidence in support of Musk’s claim, since no Tesla vehicle is currently approved for complete autonomy. In June, Openai announced that he had associated himself with the manufacturer of autonomous software applied to intuition (recent evaluation: $ 15 billion) to “advance new generation experiences and fueled by AI in vehicles around the world”. Altman then praised Openai’s progress in the development of autonomous technology, while obliquely dissiving Tesla’s progress: “We have a new technology that could simply be self-winning for standard cars much better than any current approach has worked,” said Altman, his brother’s podcast, Not tackled with Jack Altman.
Altman also supported the company Longshot Space, which dreams of taking SpaceX from Musk with a gigantic pistol that pulls in orbit (seriously). He also invested in Glydways, another Robocar startup which could one day compete with Tesla’s autonomous robotaxis.
Neither Musk nor Altman responded to Forbes’ Comments for this article.
Musk, 54, and Altman, 40, were not always disagreement. The two men met for the first time in the early 2010s, that Altman was president of the startup incubator y combinator and musk worked to build SpaceX and Tesla. The two men linked themselves to their common concern concerning the dangers of artificial intelligence, and they co -founded Openai in 2015 as a non -profit goal with the mission of developing AI in a responsible manner. Musk was the biggest funder in the organization, giving $ 44 million in 2016 and 2017.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman speak on stage at the Vanity Fair New Easablishment Summit on October 6, 2015 in San Francisco, California, at the time when they were still friends. (Photo of Michael Kovac / Getty Images for Vanity Fair)
Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Musk left the Board of Directors of Openai in 2018 after having pretended to be tried and failed to merge the entity into Tesla, but even then, the two men have apparently remained on good terms. In 2019, for a difficult period for Tesla, Altman made a jump against those who “root” the manufacturer of electric vehicles and warned that “betting against Elon is historically an error”. When Openai launched his Chatgpt product to the public in November 2022, Musk praised the chatbot as “good good” and scolded the New York Times so as not to write enough on the Chatppt.
The vibrations began to turn in 2023, while Musk poses the Xai seeds. Musk published a meme that February who said that Chatgpt had usurped the consumer media as “propaganda captain”. The following month, Musk expressed his concern that Microsoft has “exclusive access to the entire OPENAI code base” as part of its $ 13 billion investment in the startup. However, the two men were at least friendly with each other, commercial jokes and philosophical observations. “We live in the most interesting moments,” said Musk in October 2023, in response to Altman’s reflections on being living day by time today.
A month later, Musk made fun of chatgpt as “unbearable” and used Grok (XAI chatbot) to generate chatbot chat dishes. “The Woke Spirit virus, which is fundamentally anti-human, has been deeply anchored in the chatgpt!” Musk screams in a tweet. After a short -lived coup which briefly saw Altman ousted as the CEO of Openai, Musk warned that the organization needed “directors who deeply understand the AI and will resist Sam” and that “human civilization is at stake”.
Musk accelerated the conflict at the beginning of 2024 when he made an offer of $ 97.4 billion for OpenAi assets (although they were not for sale), then continued Openai, Altman and his colleague co -founder Greg Brockman to California, alleging that their plans to convert OPENAI into a for -profit business have violated the Foundation Foundation Contract. Musk withdrew his trial before a state judge could rule on the advisability of rejecting him, but then filed a similar complaint before the Federal Court. In April, Openai counterfeit Musk, alleging that he embarked on a “harassment campaign of several years” against Openai in the publications on courts and social media, and that his offer of $ 97.4 billion was a “simulation offer” designed to harm Openai. The judge refused Musk’s request to block OPENAI’s restructuring plans, threw some of Musk’s complaints and allowed Openai to proceed. A trial before jury is scheduled for next year.
While the bad will between men is deepened, many in Silicon Valley take out their popcorn and appreciate the spectacle. Vinod Khosla, the legendary billionaire investor who warned against the potential dangers of the AI, said that in the end, the rivalry of the pair will be good for the ecosystem as a whole. “More competition is always good,” he said Forbes By e-mail.
Good luck convincing Musk or Altman of that.
