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Technology leaders Elon Musk and Sam Altman traded barbs on social media over the weekend after the SpaceX founder used Apple’s new trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI to bash Altman over an alleged “scam.”
Musk on Saturday posted to X that Altman “takes scamming to a whole new level,” nearly a day after Apple announced its lawsuit against OpenAI for allegedly attempting to access and steal confidential information about their tools and unreleased products.
Altman hit back at Musk, writing, “homeboy, you’re the one selling public market investors on short-term space datacenters.”
“We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves,” Musk responded. “After stealing an open source AI charity, you then stole all of Apple’s phone technology! Wow. What do you plan for an encore? That’s tough to beat.”
Altman, who co-founded OpenAI alongside Musk in 2015, was referring to Musk’s push and vow to put data centers in space. Musk argues you can scale a “trillion times” more than you could on Earth, as data center development on Earth faces backlash over their presence in neighborhoods or communities, and how they could be contributing to rising consumer electricity costs.
The interaction is the latest in a years-long feud between the two technology executives, who often use one anothers’ current business challenges to criticize each other.
Apple’s lawsuit, filed last Friday, accuses OpenAI and two former employees of stealing Apple’s confidential information and handing it over to the ChatGPT maker when they joined the company.
OpenAI “has been instructing” Apple employees to bring proprietary information like design prototypes, tools, or communications with vendors to interviews to “divulge” details about their work, attorneys for Apple wrote Friday.
A spokesperson for OpenAI told The Hill on Friday that the company has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.”
Altman and OpenAI won a separate legal challenge from Musk earlier this year, after a California federal jury unanimously rejected Musk’s claims over the company’s alleged shift away from its founding mission.
The jury found Musk took too long to file the lawsuit, missing the deadline for the three-year statute of limitations, and the judge threw out all of the claims.
Musk and Altman founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 with former Stripe executive Greg Brockman, computer scientist Ilya Sutskever and others. The Tesla CEO joined forces with Altman and the others to launch the company as he voiced concerns about AI safety.
Musk invested about $38 million in OpenAI from late 2015 through May 2017. He argued he was misled by the company when they decided to create a for-profit entity to get more capital for AI development, and put commercial interests over its original mission focused on humanity.
Musk eventually stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2018, citing potential conflicts of interest with his work for Tesla. OpenAI went on to add the for-profit arm in 2019 and altered its structure last year to convert the entity into a public benefit corporation that remained under control of the nonprofit.
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