Sam Altman Claps Back: OpenAI CEO Dismisses Elon Musk’s Microsoft Critique as ‘Baseless Noise’

Silicon Valley’s latest tech feud just got juicier. OpenAI’s Sam Altman isn’t mincing words after Elon Musk took shots at the AI giant’s partnership with Microsoft—calling the Tesla CEO’s remarks ‘irrelevant’ to their moonshot ambitions.

Behind the billionaire sparring: While Musk warns of AI’s ‘existential risks,’ Altman’s team keeps shipping code that makes Azure the backbone of enterprise AI. Meanwhile, Wall Street still can’t decide if this is real disruption or just another hype cycle to pump cloud revenue.

One thing’s clear: When tech titans brawl, VCs grab popcorn—and retail investors get left holding the bag.

Microsoft rollout triggers another round in the feud

Sam and Elon have been trading blows for years. They started OpenAI together back in 2015 as a nonprofit AI lab, but split when they disagreed over its direction.

OpenAI later shifted toward a for-profit model, pulling in Microsoft as its biggest backer. Elon went on the offensive this year with a lawsuit claiming breach of contract, then dropped it.

Not long after, Elon led a group that tried to buy the nonprofit controlling OpenAI for $97.4 billion. Sam rejected the offer publicly with, “No thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Speaking to CNBC at the time, Sam called the bid an attempt to “slow down a competitor.”

Now, Microsoft’s integration of GPT-5 is set to give OpenAI’s tools even wider reach. Elon’s comment about OpenAI “eating Microsoft alive” landed just as Satya spoke. The timing kept the public feud alive, with each side digging in through statements and posts.

In a tournament built to see which general-purpose AI could handle chess, OpenAI’s o3 model had beaten Elon’s Grok 4 in the final. These weren’t traditional chess engines but AI systems built for everyday tasks, thrown into a different kind of test.

The o3 model went unbeaten. In the final, Grok 4 made several errors, including losing its queen more than once, which sealed its loss. Google’s Gemini came in third after knocking out another OpenAI entry in an earlier round.

Chess has long been a way to measure a computer’s ability to plan and calculate. This contest showed how far, and how far behind, these multipurpose AI tools can be when given a structured, rules-based challenge. Despite the mistakes, both Sam and Elon still claim their latest AI models are the smartest in the world.

If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.