Every few months, billionaire Elon Musk feels an irrepressible urge to pick a new fight or revive an old one.
His latest brawl involves Sam Altman, whose company OpenAI is on track to reach 700 million weekly active users with ChatGPT.
Musk has threatened to sue Apple over supposedly biased App Store rankings, favouring ChatGPT over Grok, the chatbot developed by his AI company xAI. He is also instigating Altman with a series of posts on X over whose chatbot is superior.
After Musk said that “Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation”, Altman offered a strongly worded response.
“This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like,” Altman posted on X.
Musk went on to call Altman a “liar”, which was met with a swift reply from the OpenAI CEO: “Will you sign an affidavit that you have never directed changes to the X algorithm in a way that has hurt your competitors or helped your own companies?”
Musk’s xAI is trying to navigate choppy waters. The company has lost key figures in quick succession. On August 14, co-founder Igor Babuschkin announced his decision to leave to “continue on my mission to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity”.
Last week, Robert Keele said he had stepped down as xAI’s head of legal after just over a year “I love my toddlers and I don’t get to see them enough,” he said.
In July, Linda Yaccarino stepped down as X’s CEO, days after Grok invoked Adolf Hitler and accused a user of “gleefully celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids in the recent Texas flash floods”.
Financial Times has reported this week that Altman and OpenAI are backing a new company called Merge Labs to develop brain implants, which is a direct rival to Musk’s Neuralink.
Musk’s fallout with Altman can be traced to OpenAI’s early days. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but left the company in 2018, citing disagreements with the other co-founders over the company’s direction. The situation deteriorated on the second day of US President Donald Trump’s time in office this year. His nemesis touted a $500-billion investment in AI infrastructure called Stargate in the presence of Trump, winning the tariff-happy man’s heart.
Apple announced a partnership with ChatGPT in June last year, but there is no suggestion of Apple favouring one app over the other. AI apps such as DeepSeek and Perplexity have topped the App Store in the past. In a statement to Bloomberg, Apple said: “We feature thousands of apps through charts, algorithmic recommendations and curated lists selected by experts using objective criteria. Our goal is to offer safe discovery for users and valuable opportunities for developers, collaborating with many to increase app visibility in rapidly evolving categories.”
Musk has in the past been critical of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for reportedly shorting Tesla stock. The 54-year-old has also challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match challenge.
