What Sam Altman and Elon Musk Have Said About Each Other

Elon Musk and Sam Altman may be pioneers in the same industries, but that doesn’t mean they’re on the same page.

The two tech CEOs have a storied history of interactions, ranging from starting businesses together to complicated personal and legal battles over the future of artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in December 2015 to develop artificial intelligence that benefits humanity. After meeting in 2010, the pair frequently discussed artificial intelligence, with Altman thinking of the SpaceX founder as a “mega-hero.”

“I thought what Elon was doing was absolutely incredible for the world at a time when most of the world was not thinking very ambitiously. He pushed a lot of people, me included, to think much more ambitiously,” Altman told The New York Times in December.

Leaving OpenAI

Musk left OpenAI in 2018, citing disagreements over the organization’s direction. He later revealed his concerns about potential conflicts of interest as Tesla increasingly invested in AI development.

“I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do…it was just better to part ways on good terms,” Musk tweeted in February 2019.

In a blog post describing the departure, OpenAI described Musk as initially supportive of the company: “Elon left OpenAI, saying there needed to be a relevant competitor to Google/DeepMind and that he was going to do it himself. He said he’d be supportive of us finding our own path.”

The post also included private correspondence between Altman and Musk.

The relationship between the two took a turn for the worse in 2020 when Musk criticized OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, which marked the organization’s transition toward a for-profit model. On Twitter, Musk remarked, “OpenAI was meant to be open. This feels like the opposite.”

Legal Battles

The relationship turned into a legal dispute in February 2024 when Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, alleging that the organization had abandoned its nonprofit roots.

“OpenAI Inc has been transformed into a closed-source, de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world,” Musk’s filing read.

OpenAI responded with a blog post on its website “to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims,” calling Musk’s posts “frivolous.”

Altman defended the deal with Microsoft in an interview with Time: “We set up a really thoughtful deal with Microsoft. We’re a super mission-focused company.”

In August 2024, Musk expanded his lawsuit to include Microsoft, accusing both OpenAI and the tech giant of monopolistic practices.

OpenAI described the accusations as “baseless,” telling the BBC: “Elon’s third attempt in less than a year to reframe his claims is even more baseless and overreaching than the previous ones.”

The most recent developments saw Musk file a legal injunction in December to block OpenAI’s plans to expand its for-profit operations. In the filing, he called the organization a “Frankenstein’s monster” that had strayed far from its founding principles.

At a conference that month, Altman remarked, “It would be profoundly un-American to use political power, to the degree that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses, and I don’t think people would tolerate that. I don’t think Elon would do it,” the Associated Press reported.

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