Sam Altman and Elon Musk have had a complicated relationship over the years, from teaming up to start OpenAI to now being bittter rivals. While Musk has had feuds with many American enterpreneurs in the past including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, the altercation with Altman seems much more personal for the Tesla CEO.
Earlier this week, Musk via his lawyer approached the OpenAI board for a $97.4 billion offer to takeover the non-profit arm of the ChatGPT maker. While the board also recently declined Musk’s offer, prior to that, Altman had lashed on his old comrade and called him ‘insecure’ and not happy.
In an interview with Bloomberg during the Paris AI summit, snippets of which have now gone viral, Altman said, “OpenAI is not for sale. The OpenAI mission is not for sale… I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor… He’s working hard and and has raised a lot of money for xAI, and they’re trying to compete with us from a technological perspective, from, you know, getting the product into the market and I wish he would just compete by building a better product” Altman said in the interview.
“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” the OpenAI CEO added.
Prior to this, Altman had even went on to state that he would like to buy Twitter/X for $9.74 billion. Notably, Musk had bought Twitter in a mammoth $44 billion deal at the end of 2022 and since then the valuation of social media giant has significantly come down.
Notably, Musk has filed various lawsuits against OpenAI and its co-founders in the last few years. In August last year, Musk also added Microsoft to his suit, noting that the Satya Nadella led company along with OpenAI was leading to creation of a monopolistic environment in the AI world.
