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.