Once upon a time, Elon Musk and Sam Altman were friends and co-founders who regularly dined out together and enjoyed a mentor–mentee-type relationship. Now they face off in courtrooms and get into fights on X over who’s a “scammer” and who has a crippling obsession with whom.
Over the weekend, Musk responded to the news that Apple had sued Altman’s OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets by posting “Scam Altman strikes again.” Perhaps worried that only about 600,000 people had viewed the barb, he then doubled down by writing, “He takes scamming to a whole new level,” which garnered more than 19 million views. After that, the richest man in the world posted a photo of Altman with the text “I’m doing this because I love it,” to which he added, “By ‘this’ he means scamming.” The world’s first trillionaire — who could do anything his heart desires at any moment in time — chose to then respond to his own post, writing, of his former colleague, “He might literally love scamming more than any human alive!”
That last one apparently got Altman’s attention; the OpenAI founder shot back, “homeboy you’re the one sellling public market investors on short-term space datacenters.” In a separate post, he suggested that the flurry of attacks from Musk had to do with OpenAI releasing a new generative-AI model the same week SpaceX released its latest: “There are a lot of benchmarks that suggest 5.6 sol is the best model in the world right now, but the most reliable way to tell is that elon is obsessed with me again.” Hours later, Musk responded to Altman’s dig about his “space datacenters” by suggesting Altman is going to prison.
