Jealousy is a disease.
Sticks and Stones
This week, tech rivals Elon Musk and Sam Altman have been falling over themselves to win the favor of returning president Donald Trump.
The petty squabble started on Tuesday, when an aggrieved Musk took to social media to put down Trump’s just-announced $500 billion AI project, “Stargate.” Altman’s OpenAI was a prominently-featured partner in the project while Musk’s xAI was passed over, with Trump calling Altman the “leading expert based on everything I read.”
That didn’t sit well with Musk, who fumed online that OpenAI doesn’t “actually have the money” for the project. Altman shot back that Musk was “wrong, as you surely know,” and invited him to “come visit the first site.”
Is it skin-crawlingly embarrassing to see adults publicly grovel for the affection of a daddy figure? Absolutely — but in the uneasy new world of the tech industry under Trump, it’s probably going to be par for the course.
Best Boy
Musk then doubled down by reposting a 2021 screenshot of a tweet by Altman in which the OpenAI CEO praised efforts to keep Trump from being reelected in the 2020 election. For good measure, he kept reposting and replying to anti-Altman posts well into Wednesday night, with his usual insightful commentary: “Wow” and “True.”
“Altman literally testified to Congress that he wouldn’t get OpenAI compensation and now he wants $10 billion!” Musk quote tweeted one Reuters article. “What a liar.”
Why is Trump’s embrace of Altman getting so deeply under Musk’s infamously thin skin? The two have a history, but the main issue lately is clearly that Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump reelected, while Altman is a johnny-come-lately to the Trump Train — and already reaping the benefits.
The rift is likely to be one of many we’ll see in the months to come as the wealthy and powerful flock to the Oval Office to win the privilege of Trump’s ear. That said, it’s unlikely any will be quite as dramatic as that between Musk and Trump, an unlikely alliance between two notoriously difficult personalities that seems liable to fall apart at any moment.
Altman, who has a more subdued profile and who’s mostly let Musk rage without reply throughout the tiff, finally caved earlier today with a cutting subtweet: “just one more mean tweet and then maybe you’ll love yourself.”
More on posting: Elon Musk Once Said He Mainly Tweets While Pooping, So We Now Have Grave Concerns About the Condition of His Gastrointestinal System