The dispute between arguably the two biggest names in generative artificial intelligence—billionaires Sam Altman and Elon Musk—erupted this week after President Donald Trump announced a $500 billion Stargate initiative bolstering Altman’s OpenAI, a victory for the company in its arms race against Musk’s xAI and other AI companies, exacerbating a beef that stretches back several years.
Elon Musk, left, and Sam Altman appear together in 2015.
Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Timeline
- January 23, 2025: Trump brings the feud between Altman and his close ally Musk to a national stage, telling reporters, “Elon doesn’t like one of those people” involved in Stargate, apparently referring to Altman. Earlier Thursday, Altman wrote on Musk’s X social media platform, “just one more mean tweet and then maybe you’ll love yourself…,” making what seemed a pointed dig at Musk in response to his flurry of negative tweets about Stargate and Altman.
- January 22, 2025: Musk questioned whether the “fake” Stargate had secured the announced funding and tore into Altman on X, referring to him as a “swindler” and a “liar.” He also reshared Altman’s 2021 post celebrating Trump’s 2020 election loss. Altman fired back, stating he doesn’t think Musk is a “nice person” and Musk’s criticism stems from his involvement with an OpenAI rival, writing, “what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies.”
- January 21, 2025: Altman appeared alongside Trump to announce the $500 billion Stargate joint venture aimed at building the physical data centers needed to power OpenAI’s artificial general intelligence ambitions. Trump notably lauded Altman as “by far the leading expert” in generative AI, while Altman praised Trump, saying the project wouldn’t have been possible “without you.”
- March 1, 2024: Musk initially sued OpenAI for allegedly becoming a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of its investor Microsoft. In November, he followed up with a preliminary injunction to stop the “market-paralyzing gorgon” OpenAI from becoming a for-profit entity and later called Altman “someone who is not trustworthy” during an October interview with Tucker Carlson.
- July 12, 2023: Musk announced his own generative AI startup, xAI, creating the generative AI chatbot Grok, which he described as an anti-“woke” response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT program, released to the public on November 30, 2022, to significant fanfare.
- 2018: Musk left OpenAI’s board of directors in what the organization described as a decision to eliminate “a potential future conflict for Elon…as Tesla continues to become more focused on AI,” referring to the electric vehicle company’s push into autonomous driving. However, OpenAI later recounted the circumstances as more contentious, stating Musk left after the company rebuked his attempts to gain more than 50% equity, the chief executive role at a for-profit OpenAI, or to merge OpenAI into Tesla.
- 2015: Altman and Musk were among 11 cofounders of OpenAI, serving as co-chairs of the non-profit research organization with the mission to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” According to its introductory blog post, Altman, Musk, and billionaire venture capitalists Reid Hoffman (famously a Democratic megadonor) and Peter Thiel (famously a GOP megadonor) were among those who infused OpenAI with $1 billion at its founding.
Key Background
Musk and Altman’s public quarrel is front and center of the messy AI arms race between OpenAI and xAI, with other competitors including Alphabet parent Google, Facebook parent Meta and the Amazon-backed startup Anthropic.
Microsoft is OpenAI’s most notable investor, injecting about $14 billion in the ChatGPT parent over the last five years, with the world’s largest company, leading AI tech architect Nvidia, investing in OpenAI’s most recent funding round which valued the company at $157 billion.
That is larger than the $60 billion and $50 billion respective valuations of the also private Anthropic and xAI. Stargate is a joint venture between OpenAI, cloud computing giant Oracle and foreign investment groups MGX and SoftBank which secured a $100 billion initial commitment and $500 billion over the next four years to build AI infrastructure, including data centers, in the U.S., Trump and the companies announced this week.
Forbes Valuations
Musk is easily the richest person on the planet with an estimated net worth of $425 billion. Less than $50 billion of that comes from his 54% stake in xAI, while his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX, both of which he also leads as CEO, account for a majority of his wealth.
Altman is the 2,543rd-richest person with a $1.2 billion fortune thanks mostly to early investments in companies like social media company Reddit and financial technology company Stripe. Altman does not have equity in OpenAI, so Forbes’ estimates of Altman’s fortune do not account for OpenAI, though Bloomberg reports OpenAI has discussed granting Altman a 7% equity stake in the company, a stake which would be worth $11 billion at OpenAI’s most recent $157 billion valuation.
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