As the Elon Musk and Donald Trump partnership grew closer and closer on the election trail last year, the primary question spectators were asking was: How long will this last? The second was likely to be: How large will the fallout be?
Musk also claimed Trump was in the Epstein files—a statement he has since walked back on. The president said he was “very disappointed” in the richest man on Earth and threatened to withdraw government subsidies from Musk’s private endeavors.
If there’s one person who saw the fallout coming, it was OpenAI’s boss Sam Altman.
Altman knows firsthand what it’s like to partner with Musk and then watch the bridges burn.
In 2015, the duo were some of the founding partners of OpenAI.
In 2023, Musk announced the launch of xAI, which subsequently released its chatbot, Grok, to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
By 2024, OpenAI and Musk were locked in a legal battle, with Musk later launching a bid to acquire OpenAI to which Altman jokingly responded he would buy X—formerly known as Twitter—from Musk.
Musk, who has also founded brain implant company Neuralink, was further enraged when Altman and OpenAI were heavily involved in the launch of the White House’s $500 billion Stargate initiative, a large-scale project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.
Representatives for Musk did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
But Musk isn’t the only tech titan Altman is currently jostling with.
When asked about how he was feeling about the talent war with a Big Tech rival, Altman responded yesterday he felt “fine,” adding: “I mean obviously we have an incredibly talented team and I think they really love what they’re doing. Obviously, some people will go different places—there’s a lot of excitement, I guess you could say, in the industry.”
Altman added that he hadn’t spoken to Zuckerberg about poaching talent but expects to see him this week at the Sun Valley conference.
He said the clash between the world’s richest man and arguably the world’s most powerful isn’t particularly surprising, explaining: “Both are very powerful personalities and both have individual strength, in the case of Musk he has a bully pulpit through his social media, and he has the economic power that he wielded in the election. Trump obviously has the political power and the power of the office of president.
“So given that there was such powerful personalities and that each has its own almost separate power base [it’s] not surprising that sooner or later, they would have a bit of a falling out.”
Musk had previously been jostling with members of the Trump team on issues like tariffs, outright opposing Trump 2.0’s headline policy and lambasting its architects, such as advisor Peter Navarro.
Secretary Ross added that despite such rifts, Trump respected some of the work Musk had done with DOGE: “I think Trump has made clear he does like what DOGE accomplished and indeed he’s continuing with a lot of the Musk people in further implementing those throughout the administration. I think there’s clearly a mutual respect between the two, but you know, even happily married people occasionally have a spat.”
