Elon Musk lost his case against Sam Altman in court. This weekend, he tried to win it back on X, one insult at a time.
The two men who founded OpenAI spent the weekend calling each other frauds in public. It played out on X, in real time, in front of millions. By the end Musk had branded Altman a “scammer” more than half a dozen times, Altman had turned the abuse into a marketing line, and X’s own head of product had piled in.
None of it was really about the law. It was about who gets to narrate the AI boom, and whose company the markets believe.
How it kicked off
The trigger was a lawsuit, though not one of Musk’s. On Friday, Apple sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing hardware trade secrets. Musk pounced. “Scam Altman strikes again …”, he wrote, as CNBC’s Jordan Novet reported. Minutes later he doubled down: “He takes scamming to a whole new level”.
