Altman Versus Musk Is the Biggest Feud in Tech. What’s The Beef?

At every point in the tech industry’s evolution, chief executives have found some reason to fall out. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs clashed during the early scramble to dominate personal computing. Jobs felt betrayed by Eric Schmidt when Google launched Android to compete with the iPhone. And Elon Musk famously challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match that never happened.

Even by those standards, the clash between Musk and Sam Altman stands out. The world’s richest man has used every tool at his disposal to undermine Altman’s leadership at OpenAI, the company they founded together a decade ago. Musk launched a rival artificial intelligence startup, took legal action to try to stop OpenAI from restructuring as a for-profit company and, in February, mobilized his wealthy allies to make an unsolicited and unsuccessful $97 billion bid for the nonprofit that controls the ChatGPT maker. Altman has slammed the offer, poked fun at Musk’s AI products and called him a bully.