WSJ deep dive: how Altman and Musk went from co-founders to bitter rivals

Summary

The Altman-Musk Feud: From Co-Founders to Bitter Rivals

Elon Musk and Sam Altman went from Wednesday dinner co-founders to courtroom enemies in less than a decade, with the tension reaching a breaking point this week as their competing visions for AI infrastructure collide at the highest levels of U.S. power.

The relationship began in 2015 with apocalyptic ambitions. Musk and Altman had regular dinners in the Bay Area discussing how the world might end—particularly through uncontrolled artificial intelligence. That May, Altman pitched creating a "Manhattan Project" for AGI, a nonprofit that would ensure Google didn't monopolize the technology. They raised up to a billion dollars, with Musk pledging the lion's share, and both agreed to serve as co-chairman. The structural flaw was obvious in hindsight: neither man had accepted he wouldn't be CEO.

The disintegration began in 2017 when OpenAI researchers realized they would need far more capital than a nonprofit could raise. Musk demanded majority control and the CEO role. Altman blocked him by securing backing from co-founders Greg Brockman and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, who emailed Musk that giving him unilateral control would "create a structure where you would become a dictator." Musk responded within hours: "This is the final straw." By early 2018, he was gone.

For years, the split seemed contained. Altman built OpenAI into a research organization that, in November 2022, released ChatGPT—one of the most transformative consumer products of the century. Musk, meanwhile, publicly criticized OpenAI for moving too fast and ignoring safety, signing an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development. By 2024, he escalated to court, filing lawsuits against Altman and OpenAI, with his lawyers declaring the conduct to be of "Shakespearean" proportions of "profanity and deceit."

But the real rupture came this month, triggered by politics and infrastructure.

Altman had been pitching a massive computing project—initially to Microsoft, which balked after his brief ouster from the CEO role in 2023. He then brought the idea to SoftBank's Masayoshi Son and Larry Ellison of Oracle, a longtime Musk associate who had been hung out to dry when XAI abandoned a Texas data center project that Ellison's company was building. Altman agreed OpenAI would take it over, and the project evolved into what became Stargate.

In December, Son golfed with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and announced his intention to invest $100 billion in U.S. infrastructure alongside Trump and Steven Mnuchin. The golf course preview ensured Musk—Trump's close ally and resident at the Mar-a-Lago complex—remained unaware of the actual details.

On the first day of Trump's second term, Musk watched from the White House as Altman and Trump announced Stargate: a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment. Musk fumed to aides, claiming the backers didn't actually have the funding lined up. He was right—it was closer to a roadshow announcement than a finalized deal.

Within days, Musk filed a $97.4 billion hostile bid for the nonprofit assets controlling OpenAI, claiming Altman planned to undervalue the nonprofit's stake in the for-profit conversion. His real message to investors was simpler: go to war with Sam Altman.

Altman was at the Paris AI Summit when the bid broke. When asked by a reporter, he said he just wanted Musk to stop. OpenAI's board, led by Brett Taylor, unanimously rejected the bid. Musk's lawyer vowed to ensure OpenAI returned to "the open source safety focused force for good it once was."

Altman responded with characteristic nice-guy brutality. "Per probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity, he said on Bloomberg TV. "I feel for the guy. I don't think he's a happy person."

The two men are structurally different. Musk was beaten up and verbally abused as a child and tends toward the abrasive. Altman, by contrast, was a teacher's pet from a wealthy family who tells people what they want to hear. But both share a strikingly similar taste for power. Altman once admired Musk as a real-life Tony Stark offering a counterexample to American technological stagnation. Now, they are locked in what the Journal describes as "one of the highest stakes and most personal fights in recent business history."

The outcome will determine control over a technology that could reshape work itself—and influence over the new president.