Sam Altman and Elon Musk have had a complicated relationship over the years, from teaming up to create OpenAI to now being bitter rivals. While Musk has had feuds with many American entrepreneurs in the past, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, the dispute with Altman appears to be much more personal for the Tesla CEO.
Earlier this week, Musk, through his lawyer, approached the OpenAI board with a $97.4 billion offer to take over the non-profit arm of the ChatGPT maker. While the board recently rejected Musk’s offer, Altman had previously lashed out at his old comrade, calling 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.
Previously, Altman had even stated that he would like to buy Twitter/X for $9.74 billion. Notably, Musk had bought Twitter in a mammoth $44 billion deal in late 2022, and since then, the social media giant’s valuation has dropped significantly.
Notably, Musk has filed various lawsuits against OpenAI and its co-founders over the past few years. In August last year, Musk also added Microsoft to his lawsuit, stating that the Satya Nadella-led company, along with OpenAI, was leading to the creation of a monopolistic environment in the AI world
