Musk v Altman: Watch the billionaires’ faux fight for humanity

If billionaire biffo is your entertainment weakness, the latest outbreak in the war between Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman will have you glued to your X feed. It’s like a Worldwide Wrestling Federation bout, but with moneyed rather than muscled contestants.

Similarly, there is no shortage of theatre when these testosterone-charged tech entrepreneurs attempt to land a mat-hitting manoeuvre – but without doing any real damage.

Ever the showman, Musk has reportedly lobbed a $US97.4 billion ($155 billion) offer to get control of the company at the centre of the generative AI revolution, Open AI – inventor of ChatGPT – which he co-founded with Altman as a charity a decade ago, and which Altman now runs but Musk no longer has a stake in.

Elon Musk (left) cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman in 2015, but left before the company took off.Credit: Bloomberg, AP

Altman took to X (formerly Twitter) to reject Musk’s overture with a post reading “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $(US)9.74 billion if you want” – some pointed Musk mockery, given the Tesla boss paid more than four times that for Twitter three years ago.

Musk’s response was to brand Altman a “swindler” - which admittedly is pretty tame by Musk standards.

It’s challenging to keep track of the number of spats with other billionaires that Musk has engaged in – including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, even our own Andrew Forrest. And to be fair, he has been at loggerheads and in a legal dispute with Altman for more than a year.

Like other massive deals in which Musk has been involved, this week’s corporate hijinks appears to be fought on the public stage through press releases and social media posts rather than the usual behind-closed-door negotiations with teams of investment bankers and corporate lawyers.

There will be many who understandably question whether this is not a tactical publicity/legal stunt.

The offer made by a consortium of investors corralled by Musk is being made for the entity that is the largest shareholder in OpenAI. There is reportedly a list of credible backers including Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and 8VC – a venture firm led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

The scary aspect to this faux theatre is that these entrepreneurs are instrumental in the development of the most important, but potentially dangerous technology of our time.

Hollywood producer Ari Emanuel reportedly rounds out the list of luminaries supporting Musk’s tilt at control of OpenAI.

A year ago, Musk launched legal action against Altman and OpenAI alleging they violated the artificial intelligence start-up’s founding mission by putting profit ahead of benefiting humanity.

Musk has also started up his own AI company xAI which could merge with OpenAI following a deal, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

It represents a fly in the ointment of Altman’s plans for OpenAI, part of which includes converting it to a for-profit company and spending up to $US500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate. 

That’s the shiny new joint venture project being promoted by (but not funded by) Donald Trump. It is actually the baby of its financial backers OpenAI, US data centre giant Oracle, Japanese investment giant SoftBank and UAE-based investment firm MGX.

Despite his close association with Trump, Musk has been busy on X openly criticising Stargate.

“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”

Altman hit back, replying to Musk that he was “wrong, as you surely know”.

The scary aspect to this faux theatre is that these entrepreneurs are instrumental in the development of the most important, but potentially dangerous technology of our time.

It would be comforting to have some adults in the room.

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