The culture of 2000s internet forum feuds has fully saturated the tech billionaire world, and the especially tantrum-prone Elon Musk is at it again this week.
The xAI CEO’s latest tirade targets Apple, which he claims is suppressing his Grok chatbot on the iOS App Store, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who he sued last year over OpenAI’s for-profit turn.
The quarrelsome CEOs have now resorted to using the meaningless output of each other’s chatbots to get their last petty shots of the fight in.
The bout started on Monday when Musk accused Apple of violating antitrust law by promoting OpenAI products like ChatGPT over other AI apps on the iOS App Store, threatening “immediate legal action.”
OpenAI and Apple announced a partnership in June 2024, though there’s no evidence that Apple is suppressing other AI products in favor of OpenAI’s.
“This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like,” Altman retorted, referring to Musk’s control over X’s algorithms and rules.
“Scam Altman lies as easily as he breathes,” Musk responded.
The Altman and Musk feud goes much further back than App Store rankings. The pair founded OpenAI together as a non-profit with a stated mission of ensuring that AI “benefits all of humanity,” but fell out when OpenAI transitioned into a not-quite-so-non-profit company (it’s now a non-profit with for-profit subsidiaries).
Musk sued OpenAI and Sam Atlman in 2024, claiming that he was “betrayed” by the company. OpenAI offered a different version of events, saying that Musk had been on board with the for-profit move, but had insisted on taking control of the company himself or making it part of Tesla.
This week’s fight has devolved to the point that the pair are referring to answers from each other’s chatbots to validate their positions: OpenAI promoted a Grok response declaring Altman to be in the right, and Musk responded with a ChatGPT screenshot declaring him to be the more trustworthy of the two.
According to Musk, Grok took Altman’s side because the bot “gives way too much credibility to legacy media sources,” something he considers “a major problem” and vows to fix. In other words, he will make Grok say what he wants it to, like any billionaire with his own media outlet. (A previous attempt to alter Grok’s responses resulted in a brief obsession with South African racial politics.)
The spat will no doubt improve public trust in the tech leaders, who control billions in capital, and their products, the inherent flaws of which they are keen to demonstrate.