Elon Musk doesn’t seem like someone who can be beaten. He fought the auto industry giants with Tesla—and won. He challenged the dominance of NASA and global aerospace powers with SpaceX—and succeeded. He even managed to wrestle Twitter, the unruliest tech company, and reshape it on his own terms. Yet somehow, it appears one person may have beaten Musk: Sam Altman, the cofounder and current CEO of OpenAI.
There have been so many questions swirling around Silicon Valley as of late, with people wondering how Musk is running behind Altman when it comes to the most consequential technology of our time: artificial intelligence. “I just don’t understand how Musk, who is the richest man on earth, who has taken on some of the most entrenched industries and beaten not only them, but their regulatory arms, too, lost to Sam Altman,” a Wall Street investor recently told me. “It just makes no sense.”
Who ultimately wins may come down the courts. On Friday, Musk and OpenAI jointly proposed holding a trial to adjudicate their dispute over the aforementioned company’s for-profit transition. As Business Insider put it in a headline, “Elon Musk and Sam Altman have finally agreed on something.”
Indeed, the two men despise each other. Last year Musk publicly attacked Altman as “not trustworthy,” saying in an interview that “I don’t trust OpenAI…[and] Sam Altman. I don’t think we want to have the most powerful AI in the world controlled by someone who is not trustworthy.” And in February, Altman took a public swipe back at Musk, saying, “I wish he would just compete by building a better product.” Altman then added, “Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy…. I don’t think he’s, like, a happy person.”
The war between Musk and Altman really began back in December 2015, when Musk, Altman, and a handful of Silicon Valley visionaries launched OpenAI with a bold mission: to ensure artificial intelligence would benefit humanity, rather than potentially destroy humanity—an idea that largely started after Musk and Larry Page got into a debate about robots and AI competing to take over the earth, something Page was all for, and Musk thankfully was very much against. Backed by $1 billion in donations, the nonprofit vowed to openly share research and prioritize safety. Musk and Altman, allies at first, passionately warned of AI’s existential dangers and sought to set a moral compass that could save humanity from itself—or at least its robot overlords.
“I really trust him,” Altman told Vanity Fair at the time when asked about working with Musk, who already had plenty of projects in the works. “The thing that Elon said, which was exactly what I was thinking, as well, is he was willing to trade the extra time for sleeping better at night,” Altman recalled. “As soon as he said that I was like, Yes. I feel that way.”
Almost immediately, the idealism of humanity-saving AI clashed with the reality of human egos and money. Advanced AI, it turns out, is wildly expensive. At the time Musk was worried OpenAI would fall behind Google’s DeepMind, and he proposed a drastic solution in late 2017, according to an OpenAI blog post: take control himself. It wasn’t just that Musk wanted to save humanity (although that was the original driving philosophy), but according to emails between Musk and other OpenAI executives, Musk saw the possibility of integrating OpenAI into his car company, which could benefit from some advanced AI for its driverless car tech and its own robotic ambitions.
But when Musk presented the idea Altman and other OpenAI founders pushed back. The disagreement boiled over in what one person who worked at OpenAI told me “was a shouting match between Sam and Elon in the middle of the OpenAI offices that ended with Musk storming out.” Publicly, Musk resigned by citing a conflict of interest with Tesla, and according to OpenAI’s blog post, Musk wrote in an email, “It seems to me that OpenAI today is burning cash and that the funding model cannot reach the scale to seriously compete with Google.” The former OpenAI executive I spoke with believed that Musk was distracted with other projects at the time and thought OpenAI would end the same way Altman’s last start-up did (it failed) and that would be the end of the story.
Without Musk’s checkbook (and support) to keep the company going, OpenAI made a controversial pivot. In 2019, it spun off a “capped-profit” entity, allowing it to attract investors while promising to limit returns and funnel excess profits back into its original nonprofit goals, and thus began one of the more complicated nonprofit-to-for-profit relationships in Silicon Valley history. At the time, Microsoft stepped in with $1 billion, gaining exclusive rights to host OpenAI’s groundbreaking models—including GPT-3, which was a precusor to ChatGPT—on Microsoft’s platforms. As Altman quipped once, he and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had the “best bromance in tech.”
OpenAI’s valuation skyrocketed—from an estimated $14 billion back in 2021 to an estimated $157 billion today, based on news reports. The company now boasts more than 400 million weekly active users, and hopes to hit 1 billion users by the end of 2025. And the company expects to hit $11.6 billion in revenue this year, according to The New York Times, (though it still expects to lose about $5 billion). Quite a bromance indeed.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman speak onstage during “What Will They Think of Next? Talking About Innovation” at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 6, 2015 in San Francisco, California.by Michael Kovac/Getty Images/Vanity Fair.
You don’t need to be an armchair psychologist to know that Musk is irate about the company he cofounded, thought up, and funded in its infancy succeeding without him. As such, he’s seemingly spent the last five years trying to figure out how to take back the company. Which brings us to the present-day fight, where Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and cofounder Greg Brockman, alleging they had misled investors and donors by abandoning the nonprofit ethos he championed and that Altman put profit before “the benefit of humanity.” A group of investors led by Musk even offered to buy the entire operation for around $97.4 billion to restore its original mission. In the suit, Musk’s emotions shined through when he also noted that the company’s goals were “betrayed by Altman and his accomplices” and that “the perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions.”
As one investor with knowledge of the back-and-forth told me, Musk thought the entire thing would fall apart when he stormed out of the office that day. “He was wrong,” this investor told me. This person said that it wasn’t so much that Musk had lost to Altman, but that Musk had lost to himself. Musk thought that without him at the helm of OpenAI, Altman would fail.
Where these two titans do seem similar is that they are both constantly embroiled in turmoil. At least a dozen people who helped build ChatGPT and OpenAI’s core offerings—including chief technology officer Mira Murati, cofounder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and vice president of research Barret Zoph—have departed the company. In November 2023, internal tensions exploded publicly when OpenAI’s nonprofit board abruptly fired Altman, citing concerns about his communication. According to The New York Times, the firing set off a weekend of Succession-like chaos, and Altman forced his way back into the company. (His days-long ousting is referred to by OpenAI employees simply as “The Blip.”)
When Musk became the public head of DOGE, which has spent the past few months dismantling the United States government, Altman managed to “sneak,” as The New York Times put it, his way into the White House to cozy up to Donald Trump as the president announced Stargate, a project that plans to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years, led by a joint venture with OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, among others. It had been in the works for many months, but Altman had allowed Trump to take credit for being involved with it in his first days in office, according to The New York Times.
The entire charade clearly irked Musk. Later, when Trump was asked by a reporter how he felt about Musk criticizing Stargate, Trump defended Musk and acknowledged the vitriol between the two men. “He hates one of the people in the deal,” Trump said to the reporter. “Elon, one of the people he happens to hate, but I have certain hatreds of people too.”
Meanwhile, it appears Microsoft is growing increasingly frustrated with OpenAI and has started shifting gears. Recent reports indicate that Microsoft is developing its own in-house AI reasoning models, internally referred to as MAI, that could compete with some of OpenAI’s offerings. This strategic move is reportedly intended to reduce reliance on OpenAI’s technology and potentially lower operational costs. The company has begun testing these models within its Copilot products and is considering making them available to external developers. Additionally, Microsoft has been integrating third-party AI models, such as DeepSeek’s R1, into its Azure platform, further diversifying its AI capabilities. This shift underscores that Microsoft doesn’t care who its partner is, it just wants to win.
If this is all sounding very dramatic, that’s because it is. The stakes of what could happen are monstrous. As these AI companies continue to eat the world, taking over jobs in countless sectors, and as they become even more powerful, whoever is in charge of them will be the emperor, as one person who knows Musk and Altman told me. “Musk wants to be emperor and Altman wants to be emperor, but as history tells us, you can only have one emperor, so only one of them is going to win,” this person said. You don’t need to look much further from what Musk is doing in the US government—trying to cut $2 trillion in spending without much care for the global impact of his actions—to see just how dangerous this kind of unchecked power could be.
Legal experts are split on Musk’s chances of winning this case against OpenAI. Some are skeptical that a vague founding charter, or a few emails from 2015 that are in the lawsuit, constitute an enforceable contract compelling OpenAI to stay as a nonprofit. OpenAI’s attorneys have ridiculed the lawsuit as a meritless stunt by Musk to grab a piece of a company he left years ago, saying he should compete in the marketplace instead of the courtroom—which, to be fair, Musk is doing with his own xAI platform. Still, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, in Oakland, noted last month that “something is going to trial in this case.” The two sides agreeing to fast-track a trial could see the dispute playing out in a courtroom later this year. The outcome will hinge on a high-stakes battle of he said versus he said, with Musk and Altman each determined to have the last word and stay in control of the company they both founded together.
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