Sam Altman Is Going After Elon Musk's Empire, One Company At A Time

Forbes

21 hours ago

O ver the last year, the feud between Silicon Valley heavyweights Sam Altman and Elon Musk has devolved into personal attacks, social media swipes, and lawsuits. Musk calls his foe Scam Altman and Swindly Sam. Altman has said that Musk 'can't be a happy person" and that his "whole life is from a position of insecurity." Just this week, after Musk announced he plans to sue Apple for allegedly promoting Altman's OpenAI on the app store over his own startup xAI, Altman called out Musk for manipulating X to 'benefit himself and his own companies.' Musk responded by calling Altman a liar.
The two men famously co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 before Musk left the organization's board three years later following a failed power grab. After OpenAI released ChatGPT to public acclaim in late 2022, Musk founded xAI in March 2023 and promoted it as the 'anti-woke' alternative. Last year, Musk sued Altman to stop him from turning OpenAI into a for-profit entity. Altman countersued, claiming Musk has worked "nonstop" to torpedo OpenAI.
But the rivalry between OpenAI and xAI is now just one front in the larger war between Altman and Musk. Altman has been making moves, both through OpenAI and with his own expansive investment portfolio, to develop products and technologies that target several of Musk's businesses.
Altman is backing a new brain-computer interface startup called Merge Labs, which will directly compete with Musk's own brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink, the Financial Times reported this week. Altman is a cofounder of the new venture, which is seeking to raise capital at a $850 million valuation. (Weirdly, Altman is also a small investor in Neuralink). Musk cofounded Neuralink (recent valuation: $9 billion) in 2016, and is its largest individual shareholder.
Meanwhile, Altman is positioning OpenAI to compete directly with Musk's X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. OpenAI is working to build a social media arm that would be an 'X-like social network,' according to The Verge , which first reported on those plans in April. OpenAI's push into social networking could potentially pose a big threat to X. At last count, X has around 600 million monthly users (per Statista). OpenAI says ChatGPT is more popular, with 700 million weekly users.
And Altman is coming after Tesla too. Compared to a year earlier, sales of Tesla vehicles plummeted 13.5% in the second quarter of 2025, leading Mush to pivot to self-driving taxis as a potential future area of growth for his electric vehicle maker. 'My prediction is by the end of next year, we'll have hundreds of thousands if not over a million Teslas doing self-driving in the U.S,' Musk said in May on CNBC . Maybe. But there is little evidence to support Musk's claim, given that no Tesla vehicles are currently approved for full self-driving. In June, OpenAI announced it had partnered with self-driving software maker Applied Intuition (recent valuation: $15 billion) to 'advance next-generation, AI-powered experiences in vehicles worldwide.' Altman then hailed OpenAI's progress in developing self-driving tech, while also obliquely dissing Tesla's progress: 'We have some new technology that could just do self-driving for standard cars way better than any current approach has worked,' Altman claimed his brother's podcast, Uncapped with Jack Altman.
Altman has also backed the company Longshot Space, which dreams of taking on Musk's SpaceX with a gigantic gun that shoots satellites into orbit (seriously). He has also invested in Glydways, another robocar startup that could one day compete with Tesla's self-driving robotaxis.
Neither Musk or Altman responded to Forbes' requests for comment for this article.
Musk, 54, and Altman, 40, weren't always at odds. The two men first met in the early 2010s when Altman was president of startup incubator Y Combinator and Musk was working to build out SpaceX and Tesla. The two men bonded over their shared concern about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and they cofounded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit with the mission of developing AI in a responsible manner. Musk was the organization's largest individual backer, donating $44 million in 2016 and 2017.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman speak onstage at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit on October 6, 2015 in San Francisco, California, back when they were still friends. (Photo byfor Vanity Fair) Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018 after he allegedly tried and failed to merge the entity into Tesla, but even then, the two men seemingly remained on good terms. In 2019, during a difficult time for Tesla, Altman railed against those who 'root against' the EV maker and warned that 'betting against Elon is historically a mistake.' When OpenAI launched its ChatGPT product to the public in November 2022, Musk praised the chatbot as 'scary good' and scolded the New York Times for not sufficiently writing about ChatGPT.
The vibes started souring in 2023, as Musk was laying the seeds of xAI. Musk posted a meme that February that claimed ChatGPT had usurped the mainstream media as 'the captain of propaganda.' The following month, Musk expressed concern that Microsoft had 'exclusive access to the entire OpenAI codebase' as part of its $13 billion investment in the startup. Still, the two men were at least publicly friendly with one another, trading jokes and philosophical observations. 'We live in the most interesting of times,' Musk said in October 2023, in response to Altman's musings about being alive in today's day and age.
One month later, Musk was mocking ChatGPT as 'insufferable' and using Grok (xAI's chatbot) to generate disses of the chatbot. 'The woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-human, has been deeply ingrained into ChatGPT!' Musk railed in one tweet. After a short-lived coup which briefly saw Altman ousted as OpenAI's CEO, Musk warned that the organization needed 'directors who deeply understand AI and will stand up to Sam' and that 'human civilization is at stake.'
Musk accelerated the conflict in early 2024 when he made a $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI's assets (despite them not being for sale) and then sued OpenAI, Altman and fellow cofounder Greg Brockman in California, alleging that their plans to convert OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise violated the nonprofit's founding contract. Musk withdrew his lawsuit before a state judge could rule on whether to dismiss it, but then filed a similar lawsuit in federal court. This April, OpenAI countersued Musk, alleging that he engaged in a 'yearslong harassment campaign' against OpenAI in court and social media posts, and that his $97.4 billion offer was a 'sham bid' designed to hurt OpenAI. The judge has denied Musk's request to block OpenAI's restructuring plans, tossed out some of Musk's claims and permitted OpenAI's counterclaim to proceed. A jury trial is scheduled for next year.
As the ill-will between the men deepens, many in Silicon Valley are getting their popcorn out and enjoying the show. Vinod Khosla, the legendary billionaire investor who has warned of AI's potential dangers, says that ultimately, the pair's rivalry will be good for the ecosystem as a whole. 'More competition is always good,' he told Forbes via email.
Good luck convincing Musk or Altman of that.
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