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Elon Musk and Sam Altman are fighting like kids on the playground
It feels like forever ago. The first time I tried ChatGPT, I knew it would change everything. Back in 2022, images of people had seven fingers and every other thing a chatbot spit out was nonsense. I asked Google’s Gemini for a Bible verse and it told me no because the Bible was a copyrighted work. Yikes.
At first, few of us seriously considered AI taking over our jobs, rewriting history or even creating wars. But the tech kept advancing, and then came DeepSeek, an AI model from Communist China. Suddenly, the stakes felt even higher.
In the middle of all this, we have Elon Musk and Sam Altman fighting like two kids on the playground. Before you send me a note asking why I’m talking about politics … don’t.
This is what’s happening in the world and you need to know about it. If it comes up in conversation, you’ll have an educated opinion.
These two go way back
In 2015, Altman was a 30-year-old Stanford dropout who sold his first company for $43.3 million. Musk was already a billionaire, and his companies were churning out Teslas, rocket ships and the first Starlink satellites.
That year, Musk and Altman got together with nine other folks interested in artificial intelligence to start OpenAI. Three years later, in 2018, Musk put in an offer to take over OpenAI and it was rejected. He then left to start his own AI efforts at Tesla.
Fast-forward to 2022, when OpenAI changed the world with ChatGPT. Musk wasn’t about to be left behind; he launched his own AI, Grok, about a year later. It hasn’t gotten nearly the buzz ChatGPT has.
Last year, Musk sued Altman and OpenAI (more on that below). He withdrew the suit and then refiled it a few months later. They’ve been bickering for years.
Now it’s in the global spotlight
Earlier this week, Musk and a group of investors made a $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI.
Altman fired back on X, offering to buy Twitter (X’s former name) for $9.74 billion, knowing fully well Musk paid $44 billion for the platform, whose value has since plummeted. Ouch. Musk called him a “swindler” for that one.
Oh, and they kept going. Altman recently claimed Musk is “not a happy person.” Musk, in turn, told the Wall Street Journal he hopes OpenAI will return to being “a safety-focused force for good” instead of a corporate machine tied to Microsoft’s cloud computing services.
What are they really fighting about?
Musk’s argument boils down to three things:
- Open-source AI: OpenAI was originally meant to be open-source, meaning freely available to the public. Instead, it’s taken $13 billion from Microsoft and is close to a $40 billion investment from SoftBank.
- Safety concerns: Musk warns AI needs strict ethical guardrails. He believes OpenAI has drifted from that mission.
- A force for good: In Musk’s view, OpenAI has gone from a nonprofit working for humanity to a big-money operation chasing profit. In 2024, for the record, OpenAI lost $5 billion.
The irony? Musk’s own AI, Grok, isn’t exactly an open-source, safety-first utopia, either. But when it comes to AI, neither man wants to lose.
The future of humanity or an ego battle?
At the heart of this feud is a bigger issue: Who controls AI, and where is it headed? AI is the greatest development since the Industrial Revolution. We’re getting a front-row seat to Silicon Valley’s latest drama. It’s entertaining, sure, but the future of AI is too important to be decided by billionaire grudges.
I hear from people every day who are afraid AI will take over everything and we’ll all end up like the people in “Wall-E,” glued to screens, getting rounder by the day. Nope. AI will make us more productive in so many ways. I’ll explain exactly how another time.
The scarier part is where AI is headed
The real fight isn’t just Altman versus Musk. It’s about who holds the keys to the most powerful technology in human history.
We’re not talking about chatbots answering trivia. The next step is AGI (artificial general intelligence), and that’s when AI stops following commands and starts making its own decisions. Once that happens, there’s no turning back.
Altman and Musk both have the money, power and influence to shape that future. The question is will they use it to push humanity forward or just settle personal scores while the rest of us watch?
My idea: Let’s get the boys off the playground and into the principal’s office so they can learn to play nice. My door is always open. Now, use the share icons below to pass on this know-how.
Tags: AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), AI (artificial intelligence), Elon Musk, OpenAI, Sam Altman, Tesla
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