Musk Has Upped The Ante In His Feud With Altman, Dubbing Him “Swindly Sam” And OpenAI A “Market-Paralyzing Gorgon.”

Source Of Image: “Elon Musk Dreaming of a Brighter Future” by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Musk really seems to have it out for OpenAI and Altman. The Wall Street Journal reported that he’s escalated things in his lawsuit, going so far as to call OpenAI a “market-paralyzing gorgon”—pretty harsh stuff.

And he’s even given Altman a nickname, “Swindly Sam,” which has a very Trump-esque feel to it, kind of like the way Trump used to label his opponents. 

There’s clearly some bad blood between Musk and Altman that goes back to Musk’s departure from OpenAI in 2018. According to OpenAI, Musk basically told them they had zero chance of succeeding and then announced he was going to build his own competing AGI (artificial general intelligence) over at Tesla. Ouch.

And it seems things were already strained before that. A year before he left, Musk apparently tried to take control of OpenAI—even though he was their biggest funder at the time—but they turned him down. Since then, he’s gone ahead and started his own AI venture, xAI.  

Back in March, Musk actually sued Altman and OpenAI, the folks behind ChatGPT, claiming they’d broken the nonprofit principles they were originally founded on, especially after they made that huge multi-billion dollar deal with Microsoft. 

Since then, OpenAI has changed its structure to a “capped” for-profit model. And, as CNBC reported, Musk went to court again on Friday, trying to stop OpenAI from becoming a fully for-profit company. 

It’s kind of a rollercoaster with Musk and Altman. After they seemed to patch things up with a friendly chat by a fire pit at some tech conference in Montana, Musk actually dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI, according to the Journal. But then, out of the blue, he defiled it in August. 

OpenAI hasn’t commented on any of this yet, by the way.

Now, it looks like things between them are worse than ever, especially since Musk has gotten super tight with Trump. This could be a big deal for OpenAI when it comes to regulations. Musk was one of Trump’s biggest supporters during the 2024 election, so he’s got a lot of influence now. 

Musk has even been appointed as co-head of some new government department focused on cutting spending, and he’s apparently been involved in calls with foreign leaders and pushing for his allies to get regulatory positions that oversee his own companies. That’s some serious clout. 

While Altman has been trying to build bridges with the Trump administration through people like Jared Kushner and his brother Josh (whose VC firm has even invested in OpenAI), his rocky relationship with Musk definitely throws a wrench in the works.

Musk is known for his public spats with fellow billionaires, including Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. Last year, he even challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight.

As for Altman, Musk has not held back his thoughts.

“I don’t trust OpenAI. I don’t trust Sam Altman. And I don’t think we ought to have the most powerful AI in the world controlled by someone who is not trustworthy,” he told former Fox host Tucker Carlson in October.