As the stakes are getting higher in the AI race, the barbs are also getting nastier.
Sam Altman has said that Elon Musk is not a happy person, and said that he suffers from insecurities. Altman’s comments came after Elon Musk had sent in a bid to acquire OpenAI for $97.4 billion. Altman had rebuffed his offer, posting “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want” on X. Musk had replied to this with a single word “swindler”, claiming that Sam Altman had swindled him and other investors out of their legitimate stake in OpenAI.
”OpenAI is not for sale,” Altman has now said in an interview with Bloomberg. “The OpenAI mission is not for sale. Elon tries all sorts of things for a long time. This is this week’s episode,” he said referring to Musk’s offer to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion.
“I think he’s probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor. He’s working hard and he’s raised a lot of money for XAI and they’re trying to compete with us from a technological perspective and getting the product into the market. We’ll try to just put our head down and keep working,” Altman added.
“Do you think Musk’s approach then is from a position of insecurity about xAI?” the interviewer asked him. “Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity, I feel for the guy. I don’t think he’s like a happy person. I do feel for him,” Altman said.
Altman also said that he didn’t particularly care about Musk’s closeness with President Trump, which would potentially allow him to influence US policies around the country’s AI agenda. “Maybe I should, but not particularly (care about Musk’s closeness with Trump). I mean, I try to just wake up and think about like how we’re going to make our technology better,” he said.
This isn’t the first time that Elon Musk and Sam Altman have locked horns in public. Musk accuses Sam Altman of co-founding OpenAI with him as a non-profit, and then turning it into a for-profit entity after a partnership with Microsoft. As OpenAI has been trying to convert to a for-profit entity, Musk had sued the company to prevent it from doing so. More recently, Musk had said that OpenAI’s Stargate project didn’t have the $500 billion that it had announced in building new datacenters, and then had called Sam Altman “Scam Altman”. And with Altman now making personal attacks over Musk, calling him insecure and unhappy, things seem to be heating up even more between the duo.