<
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2026/may/14/elon-musk-sam-altman-ai-feud>
"If it wasn’t already clear, Elon Musk and Sam Altman hate each other.
While the two men were once co-founders of OpenAI, they’re now locked in a
vicious feud, playing out in all its theatrics in front of a judge and jury in
a California courtroom. Musk is suing, alleging that Altman and OpenAI’s
president, Greg Brockman, tricked him into forming and funding the organization
as a non-profit before they subsequently restructured it to have a for-profit
entity. OpenAI says Musk was well aware of those plans and frames the lawsuit
as an attempt to derail a competitor.
I know this story all too well. I’ve been reporting on OpenAI since 2019,
embedding within its office for three days shortly after Musk stepped away and
Altman formally took up the CEO position. If there’s anything I’ve learned from
my years of following this company and the AI industry, it’s that this world
breeds bitter rivalries.
It’s not a coincidence that nearly all of OpenAI’s original founders left the
company under acrimonious conditions, nor that every tech billionaire has a
largely identical AI company. The frenetic AI race is inseparable from the
petty, clashing egos of the unfathomably rich, hellbent on dominating one
another.
Indeed, if Musk were to win his bid, that could be devastating for OpenAI,
especially as it prepares this year for a potential initial public offering.
Musk seeks $150bn in damages from the company and one of its top investors,
Microsoft. He also seeks to return OpenAI to a non-profit, to remove Altman and
Brockman as leaders of the for-profit, and to boot Altman off the non-profit
board.
Yet, to assume that the future of AI development will be determined by a
personality contest misses the point. Yes, Brockman’s diary entries are
revealing, as was former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati’s
testimony about Altman pitting executives against each other, confirming my
previous reporting.
But fixating on questions of whether Altman is untrustworthy, or whether Musk
is even less so distracts from a far deeper problem. If OpenAI lost its footing
as the AI industry frontrunner, another barely distinguishable competitor –
Musk’s xAI or other – would simply replace it. That includes companies like
Anthropic, who enjoy a better reputation yet engage in many similar behaviors
like compromising careful decision-making for speed, disregarding intellectual
property, and aggressively scaling their computing infrastructure to the
detriment of communities.
Nothing about this trial or OpenAI’s financial structure will change the
imperial drive of these companies to consolidate ever-more data and capital,
terraform the Earth, exhaust and displace labor, and embed themselves deep
within the state to gain leverage over its apparatuses of violence. We would
still exist in a world in which a tiny few have the profound power to cast it
in their image and dictate how billions of people live."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
