The feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman showed no signs of slowing down on Sunday, when the tech leaders again bumped heads on X over OpenAI.
“You stole a non-profit,” Musk said in an X post on Saturday, in response to a post from Altman about trying to cancel a Tesla order.
Musk and Altman cofounded OpenAI — then a nonprofit AI research company — alongside Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman in 2015. Their relationship has since soured, resulting in the pair trading jabs on social media and in legal filings. Musk stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2018 and founded a competing AI company, xAI, in 2023. Altman serves as OpenAI’s CEO.
Altman responded to Musk on Sunday, writing on X, “i helped turn the thing you left for dead into what should be the largest non-profit ever.”
“you know as well as anyone a structure like what openai has now is required to make that happen,” Altman said, adding in a follow-up post: “you also wanted tesla to take openai over, no nonprofit at all. and you said we had a 0% of success. now you have a great AI company and so do we.”
“can’t we all just move on?” Altman asked at the end of his posts.
Musk and Altman’s latest tiff began last week on X. In one exchange, Altman shared a screenshot of an email from July 2018, confirming a $45,000 payment to reserve a next-generation Tesla Roadster. Separate screenshots showed Altman requesting a $50,000 refund, and the email bouncing back.
Representatives for Musk and Altman did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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OpenAI has grown quite a bit since 2015, largely due to the popularity of ChatGPT, a generative chatbot powered by a large language model that became available in 2022. Since Musk left OpenAI’s board, he’s been vocal with his critiques of the company and Altman.
“OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all,” Musk wrote in a 2023 post.
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Musk has also taken legal action against OpenAI and Altman. Musk’s lawyers said in court filings that Altman and Brockman “deceived” Musk into cofounding the startup by leaning into his concerns over AI. Musk’s legal team also filed an injunction to get a court to stop OpenAI’s transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit company.
OpenAI completed its transition to a for-profit company in October. The company wrote in a blog post that OpenAI’s nonprofit division remains in control of its for-profit division.
“The nonprofit, now called the OpenAI Foundation, holds equity in the for-profit currently valued at approximately $130 billion, making it one of the best-resourced philanthropic organizations ever,” the company said. “The recapitalization also grants the Foundation additional ownership as OpenAI’s for-profit reaches a valuation milestone.”
The company said its for-profit division, called OpenAI Group PBC, has the same mission as the OpenAI Foundation.
“The OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group will work in concert to advance solutions to hard problems and opportunities posed by AI progress,” the company wrote.
