Tech titans Elon Musk and Sam Altman engaged in a public clash on social media, highlighting ongoing tension between them.
Musk repeatedly insulted Altman's integrity, saying he was involved in "scamming," while Altman pushed back by questioning the viability of some of Musk's current projects.
Musk was initially involved with Altman's OpenAI and helped him launch it as a nonprofit endeavor in 2015, but he cut ties with the company in 2018 and launched a competing AI project in 2023. Although OpenAI launched as a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, it has evolved into a for-profit entity now valued at $852 billion, the Associated Press reported.
Musk sued OpenAI in 2024, claiming that the company had violated its agreement with him and abandoned its mission. That lawsuit was rejected in May of this year after a jury found that Musk had missed a statutory deadline to file the lawsuit.
Apple has now also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the theft of trade secrets. "Unsurprisingly, Apple's investigation has found a pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple's confidential information," the lawsuit states. "OpenAI and its cohorts have been engaging in a coordinated pattern of misconduct at an institutional level as well."
In response to a post about the Apple lawsuit, Musk wrote, "Scam Altman strikes again ..."
He continued with other posts, saying that "He takes scamming to a whole new level" and that Altman "might literally love scamming more than any human alive!"
Altman eventually responded, questioning Musk's promotion of space datacenters.
″[H]omeboy you're the one selling public market investors on short-term space datacenters," Altman wrote in an X post.
Musk immediately pushed back against any notion that the data centers were a pie-in-the-sky type promise.
"We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves," Musk wrote on X, claiming that Altman could end up in prison.
Altman then attempted to spin Musk's attacks into proof that OpenAI's newest AI model is the best in the world.
″[T]here are a lot of benchmarks that suggest 5.6 sol is the best model in the world right now, but the most reliable way to tell is that elon is obsessed with me again," Altman wrote on another social media post.
