A war-of-words between Elon Musk and Sam Altman escalated on social media Thursday, as two of the most powerful men in tech sparred over their rival artificial intelligence initiatives.
The latest exchange began after OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, was revealed as a key player in Stargate, the AI infrastructure project announced by President Donald Trump this week that is coming with a massive investment push.
“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote in a long post on his social platform X about the new venture. It was not immediately clear who Musk was initially referring to, but Musk soon followed up, naming SoftBank, Stargate’s main financial backer.
“SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority,” he said, without elaborating. Neither Musk nor his electronic car company Tesla have publicized any formal links.
Altman responded praising Musk — “I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time,” he wrote on X” — but called his SoftBank claim wrong.
“I realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put [America] first,” he added, using an American flag emoji.
The spat has its roots in a pending lawsuit filed by Musk,a co-founder of OpenAI,over control of the company but was rekindled after Trump’s announcement this week that OpenAI would be part of the $500 billion Stargate initiative designed to make the U.S. a world leader in AI.
Late Wednesday and into Thursday, Musk continued to hammer Altman, repeatedly citing posts during Trump’s 2016 presidential run in which Altman appeared to denounce Trump.
By 8:30 p.m., Altman posted that he’d recently had a change of heart about the president: “watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him (i wish i had done more of my own thinking” he said in part. “i’m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!”
On Thursday morning, Altman posted, responding to Musk: “just one more mean tweet and then maybe you’ll love yourself…”
A Trump administration spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
The tit-for-tat between Musk and Altman is a sign of both the struggle within the tech community to curry favor with Trump and how the AI race is driving the push for tech dominance. If putting out new, consumer-friendly devices was once the way for a tech company to gain power, the struggle to create the most advanced form of AI has almost completely taken over.
The situation also points to the tension of Musk’s role as both a top Trump adviser and one of the world’s most powerful — and combative — business moguls. Musk has his own interest in AI through the social media platform X, which debuted Grok, its rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, in November.
The simmering Altman-Musk feud goes back years, well before Musk’s emergence in the U.S. political scene and even before the recent explosion of artificial intelligence technology. Companies have rushed to invest in AI infrastructure and development, so much so that it has accounted for a significant portion of recent U.S. economic growth. A Goldman Sachs paper published in June, well before the announcement of the Stargate project, projected that AI capital expenditure could top $1 trillion.
OpenAI had generally been considered the leader in AI development, though it faces major competition from other startups as well as most major tech giants that are believed to have closed the gap. That competition has made securing investments and partnerships all the more important due in large part to the sizable hardware and energy needs required to hone the models at the core of advanced AI.