Elon Musk “is a bully who likes to fight with his rivals”

The relationship between Elon Musk and Sam Altman was strained following the departure of the South African billionaire from the first board of directors of OpenAI. In recent months, old wounds have been reopened due to the statutory change that OpenAI plans to make in the coming months, which has brought both millionaires to court. In a recent interview, Sam Altman did not hesitate to call Elon Musk a “thug.”

Sam Altman has always recognized the valuable Elon Musk’s financial role when they both founded OpenAI. The last time he acknowledged that role was during his speech on the podcast The Free Presswhere he claimed that he “did a lot to help OpenAI in the early days” and then stated without batting an eyelid that “he’s also clearly a bully, and he’s also someone who clearly likes to get into fights,” Altman stated.

It’s either your way or nothing

The current CEO of OpenAI assured that Elon Musk is a “legendary entrepreneur,” and believes that the resentment that arouses in Elon Musk is the result of the recent success of OpenAI under his direction, and the fact that Musk directs xAI, one of rivals of the company that created ChatGPT.

“I think Elon would be happy with everything we are doing if he were in charge of OpenAI,” said the manager. “He left when he thought we were headed for certain failure, and also when we wouldn’t do something where he had total control over the company,” something Musk has also subsequently sought to do at Tesla.

The loss of weight in OpenAI’s decision-making was the trigger for Elon Musk’s total separation from OpenAI and marked the beginning of the development of xAI and its Grok chatbot.

That position of direct competition and OpenAI’s decision to change its status as a non-profit organization, and become a for-profit company that could compete freely in the market, has unearthed the hatchet between both millionaires.

In an open letter from OpenAI published on December 13, the company assures that “its own words and actions speak for themselves: in 2017, Elon not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit company like the new structure proposed by OpenAI. When he did not obtain the majority shareholding and full control, he walked away and told us we would fail.

Extreme competitiveness

The CEO of OpenAI assures that Elon Musk has a extreme sense of competitivenesswhich leads him to direct confrontation with those who get in the way of his plans. “Right now, it’s me. It’s been Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg and a lot of other people. I think fundamentally this is about OpenAI doing very well. Elon cares about it doing very well.”

Elon Musk has already shown plenty of examples of this behavior in the past. He has had it in for Bill Gates since he discovered that he had made short investments (at a loss) in Tesla, and since then he has not missed an opportunity to throw daggers at Gates because of that investment.

The Colosseum in Rome was about to become the scene of an epic fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg before the launch of Threads as a rival to X, until the founder of Meta began to show off his skills as an MMA fighter and of his good physical shape by accepting the challenge of the richest person in the world.

Jeff Bezos has not been able to stay on the sidelines either and has also been the target of attacks and barbs from Elon Musk, due to the competition in the space race of both millionaires.

The main difference in this case is that now Elon Musk whispers regulations in the ear of the president of the United States and that makes him a very dangerous rival for his interests. Sam Altman does not believe that Elon Musk can go that far. “I think there are people who will behave really badly on Twitter and who will not abuse the system of a country in which they now play a very influential political role. That seems completely different to me,” Altman said during his interview.

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