The Showdown Between Elon Musk and Sam Altman

The relationship between Sam Altman and Elon Musk goes back to the early days of OpenAI—then, a non-profit research lab. But now, the two men find themselves in a very public feud over the billion dollar AI company. Today on the show, we catalogue their friendship-turned-feud and how the company that started it all still remains core to their beef.

You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Zoë Schiffer on Threads @reporterzoe. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: How is everybody doing? What are we working on this week?

Zoë Schiffer: I feel great you guys. I had a meeting with Steven Levy just now, and I was really having a moment where I was like, wow, it’s so cool that I am regularly meeting with one of my literary heroes who I would read when I was desperately wanting to become a tech journalist and now we work together. So cool.

Lauren Goode: I bet if you told Steven that he would really appreciate it.

Zoë Schiffer: I didn’t. I wanted to play it a little bit cool. This was only our second one-on-one, but maybe he can tell. Lauren, how are you doing this week?

Lauren Goode: I am doing okay. I’m a little under the weather, but I’m hanging in. It could be a lot worse. And I actually had a delightful time appearing at a BBC show recently in which they were asking all about the Brologarchy. We absolutely cannot take credit for coining the phrase, the Brologarchy. It’s widespread at this point, but just so you guys know, it has spread across the pond.

Zoë Schiffer: Great. I actually feel like because we’re a podcast, we could take credit for that. We can say we coined whatever term.

Lauren Goode: It‘s true. Who’s fact-checking? Mike, how are you doing?

Michael Calore: Well, we’ve been very, very busy here at WIRED, and all of the teams have been cranking, and it’s the end of the week. We’re recording this on a Friday, and my brain is like a pineapple floating down a river and I’m ready to fish that pineapple out of the river and sell it for 9.47 Dogecoin.

Zoë Schiffer: Wow, that analogy. Incredible.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Is that a well-known metaphor or something?

Zoë Schiffer: You’re not a pineapple floating down a river, Lauren?

Lauren Goode: No. That sounds like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book, which I’m into.

Zoë Schiffer: I feel like it’s because Mike partied all last weekend and then went into the week really strong and had a really busy week. So it’s the combo platter of burning the candle from both ends, if you will.

Lauren Goode: Well, Mike, if you can’t do the show today, we got you. We’re all friends here.

Zoë Schiffer: That is very on theme because in some ways we’re talking about friendship this week, except it’s a friendship that has gone very, very sour. And thus-

Michael Calore: As sour as a pineapple.

Zoë Schiffer: As sour as a sour pineapple. Oh, yeah.

Michael Calore: That’s right. This is WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. Today, it’s a showdown. Sam Altman and Elon Musk. We’re talking about the relationship between the two of them and the company that started at all, OpenAI. I’m Michael Calore, director of Consumer Tech and Culture here at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED.

Zoë Schiffer: And I’m Zoe Schiffer, WIRED’s director of Business and Industry.

Michael Calore: Okay, it’s story time. Let’s go back to the early days of OpenAI because the two men that we were talking about today, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, have a long history, some of which began around the founding of OpenAI.

Zoë Schiffer: Okay. Taking us back to 2015 when OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab with the goal of getting to artificial general intelligence, AI that can meet or exceed human intelligence. So yeah, Elon and Sam start the company together, but within three years, Elon Musk basically thinks that OpenAI has fallen way too far behind Google and isn’t going to be able to catch up. And so he has a solution to this problem, and most Elon Musk solutions, it casts him in the role of Savior. So he goes to Sam and he says, “Hey, what if I actually take over OpenAI and I run it?” And Sam and Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder, say, “No, we don’t like that solution.” And so Elon Musk ends up walking away. He had said he was going to donate money over the next few years, but he ended up not doing that. And so by 2019, we see Sam Altman in the role of president of OpenAI and Elon Musk stepping away from the board of directors.

Lauren Goode: And they weren’t just disagreeing about the funding. They reportedly were disagreeing about OpenAI’s status as a nonprofit since it was started as a nonprofit.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. So this is a really important part of the saga because again, it starts out as a nonprofit, but really quickly as you’re alluding to, Sam Altman and Elon Musk both realize the computing power that is needed to power artificial intelligence and make these enormous leaps in the progress of these large language models is so high that you basically have to have a for-profit arm of the company. And so they do create a for-profit entity. This is the beginning of OpenAI’s super bizarre structure where it’s a nonprofit with a for-profit subsidiary. This happens in 2019, and this gets us into the growing tension between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. But before we go too far down that road, I’ll just say to answer your question, Lauren. Yeah, they both, according to emails that have since come out between the two of them, Elon Musk does seem to acknowledge that OpenAI is going to need a for-profit entity. And in fact, he suggests at one point that maybe Tesla just acquire OpenAI or OpenAI merge with Tesla, and that could be a possible solution. And again, Sam Altman’s like, “No, I do not like that solution.” And so, growing animosity, growing tension behind the scenes.

Lauren Goode: And there are power dynamics at play here, too. I think at this point, in the mid-2010s, Elon Musk was a little more well-known because of PayPal, SpaceX, founding or buying his way into founding Tesla. And Sam at this point is the YC Combinator guy who then got into AI.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Although it also is worth pointing out that the field of artificial intelligence did not have the standing and reputation that it currently does. When they started OpenAI, the idea that you would start an entire nonprofit or company to go after AGI was pretty fringe, I think it’s worth saying. We didn’t have a bunch of AI hardware products on the scene in 2018, did we?

Michael Calore: No, because there wasn’t really the back end. The chatbot revolution had not yet come.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. Okay. So what they’re doing, it’s like Lauren, to your point, there are a bunch of power dynamics. There’s a bunch of hierarchy, but I feel like it’s not until OpenAI launches on the scene with ChatGPT that this becomes an incredibly important question and people’s egos get much more involved because suddenly AI is the story in Silicon Valley. It’s the future of technology. It’s seen as this enormous shift rather than like, oh, our interesting nonprofit research lab idea.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, this feels like one of the bigger shifts that we’ve witnessed, I think, as tech journalists. The AI world was aware of these developments because of the research papers that Google and OpenAI and others put out around 2017, 2018, but it was really that November 2022 moment, I think, when ChatGPT launched that everybody wanted to get into AI.

Michael Calore: So right around that time, Lauren, when ChatGPT was shown off to the world, OpenAI had established a business partner in Microsoft. Microsoft put some money into the company. Zoe, what role did Microsoft play in making OpenAI a household name?

Zoë Schiffer: A huge role. I mean, so we mentioned that in March 2019, OpenAI, the nonprofit launches a for-profit subsidiary, which allows it to raise money. Months later, Microsoft, to your point and question, puts in a billion dollars. So at this point, OpenAI is basically off to the races, and within a couple of years, it launches ChatGPT. So it’s a big moment for OpenAI. It’s a big moment for Microsoft. It also is a big moment for the tension that’s going on between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and within OpenAI itself. The board of directors at OpenAI, the nonprofit board, has said, according to some reporting that came out after that, they didn’t actually know, or some members didn’t know that ChatGPT was launching until they saw Sam Altman’s tweet about it. And not all of them were super happy with this new direction because if you can imagine, you start a nonprofit research lab, suddenly it’s becoming like a consumer-facing app powerhouse, that’s a different direction for the company, and not everyone was happy about that.

Michael Calore: So that tension leads to an event that, again, we talked about on our Sam Altman episode, but it’s something known as the blip.

Lauren Goode: The blip, okay. The blip refers to that three to four-day period in late November 2023 when Sam Altman was ousted by the board as CEO of OpenAI, and this became, in a way, representative of at least two schools of thought around AI. There are people who think we need safety guardrails for it, and there are people who just want to accelerate it as quickly as possible. The whole thing backfired, I guess, is the best way to put it, because Microsoft swept in, they offered to scoop up Sam, they offered to hire a bunch of OpenAI employees, and at the same time, a lot of OpenAI employees signed a letter in support of Sam. So Sam ended up being reinstated, and the rest is history. The people who tried to oust him immediately left the board. Sam stacked the board with a bunch of friendlies, and Sam remains CEO of OpenAI.

Zoë Schiffer: Yes, incredibly dramatic few days where Sam leaves and comes back, the board of directors changes, every newsroom, your boss is coming to you saying, “Who do you know on the board of directors at OpenAI?” And you’re in a panic. I mean, that’s stressful. But yeah, I mean the thing that comes out of all of this is that Sam Altman is back on top, back in the leadership role at OpenAI, and he has arguably a lot more power because like Lauren said, the board is stacked with people who are more loyal to him than what it was previously.

Lauren Goode: And Zoe, did Elon Musk pipe up during any of this? What was his take on this?

Zoë Schiffer: So yeah, I mean, right around the time that OpenAI launches ChatGPT, the feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman that had been brewing in the background starts to become more public. A month after ChatGPT launches, Twitter, which Elon Musk famously owns, cuts access. OpenAI had access to the firehose of data from Twitter so it could feed into its large language models. Elon Musk cuts that access. Then he starts tweeting about how it was created as an open source nonprofit, and now it’s doing something else. And this is a big problem, and he starts to hint publicly that he doesn’t think this transformation of OpenAI from nonprofit to having a for-profit arm is above board. He hints that it might be, in his view, illegal.

Michael Calore: All right. So that pretty much brings us up to speed on the tension between these two gentlemen and the company that they’re arguing over. So let’s take a break and we’ll come right back and talk about the latest events. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So today, OpenAI is still a non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary and is in the process of converting the for-profit arm of the company into a public benefit corporation. What does that mean and why are they doing it?

Zoë Schiffer: I feel like the company has been, not mysterious, but the way they’ve talked about this switch from non-profit to for-benefit corporation is like, this is what’s needed to move OpenAI into its next era. I think it’s also true that the company just had a very confusing structure before, and it doesn’t really make sense because it’s changed so much as a company. It just isn’t a non-profit research lab anymore. It has such a big part of it has millions and millions of ChatGPT users and a bunch of different product lines. And so I think in a lot of ways this new structure might make more sense. I also think there’s a huge competition for talent within the AI community, and so it makes sense that employees would want to benefit from getting more typical stock grants like they would at a normal tech company. So I think there are a bunch of different reasons for it.

Lauren Goode: The question I have also is where does xAI play into this too? Now that Elon and Sam are direct competitors,

Zoë Schiffer: Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, okay, not to take us on too big a tangent, but obviously Elon Musk started xAI, an artificial intelligence company that directly competes with OpenAI and ChatGPT. xAI launches a chatbot called GROK that it’s like the unwoke chatbot is how it’s branded. It’s like ChatGPT, but it’ll make bad jokes and swear at you and maybe can teach you how to cook cocaine in your kitchen or whatever. I’m not sure.

Lauren Goode: Now we know what Zoe’s been using it for.

Zoë Schiffer: No, I feel like on the podcast whenever Lex Friedman and Elon are talking about it, they’re like, “Ha ha ha. Let’s, on air, ask it how to make a drug or something.” I don’t know. They’ll do some little bit and I’m like, I feel like we’ve been over this. It’ll tell you how to cook meth. I get it. Anyway, xAI has enormous resources, or I had this perception that it’s way behind OpenAI, but in fact, Elon has connected a hundred thousand GPUs in a cluster. Previously they thought the most you could connect was 30,000, and so if scaling laws hold, xAI could really be in the lead. But it’s clear that Elon Musk is still pretty seemingly, in my opinion, bitter about OpenAI’s success. And so earlier in February, he launches this unsolicited bid with a group of other investors, including people like Antonio Gracias, who is a private equity guy, and one of Elon’s closest advisors, helped advise him on the Twitter bid, is very involved with DOGE as well, and they come forward with an unsolicited offer to take over OpenAI for more than $97 billion.

Lauren Goode: How did he arrive at that number?

Zoë Schiffer: Do we ever know? I was just impressed that it wasn’t-

Lauren Goode: 420.

Zoë Schiffer: 420.

Lauren Goode: $690 billion.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, exactly. I was like, wow, we just got an actual number? I’m shocked.

Michael Calore: Well, the company is actually valued more than that. Correct?

Zoë Schiffer: I think their last valuation was like 157 billion and they’re in talks with SoftBank right now that SoftBank would lead another funding round of 40 billion, which would bring the valuation up to 300 billion, some sources have said. So yeah, we’re not a hundred percent sure how they got to the 97 billion number, but suffice to say that Sam Altman comes back immediately on X, he’s posting, “No, thank you, but all by X for 9 billion if you want.” And then Elon Musk responds to that. What does he say? “Swindler,” or something? I don’t know. They’re just like-

Michael Calore: Swindler, yes.

Zoë Schiffer: … fighting in public. It’s super messy. But Sam also behind the scenes at OpenAI is telling employees really clearly, I am not interested in this, and the board isn’t interested in this either.

Michael Calore: So why would Elon throw out a number that he knows is less than the company is actually worth?

Zoë Schiffer: So this is the interesting thing because you would think it’s still a nonprofit. It’s in the process of switching, but because the board isn’t like a typical for-profit board, it doesn’t have a fiduciary duty to maximize profit for shareholders. So maybe they can just reject this offer. But in fact, a nonprofit board, as I understand it, does have a fiduciary duty to get the fair market value for the company’s assets so that the nonprofit can achieve its mission, which is a little bit convoluted, but what it means is that maybe Elon Musk’s goal in this was not literally to take over OpenAI. Maybe his goal was to set a floor on the value of OpenAI’s assets so that Sam Altman has to pay more than $97 billion, and he can’t come in and say, “Oh, I think the assets are just worth 50 billion,” and get a sweetheart deal, because now there’s a public number attached to it that’s much higher than that.

Lauren Goode: I don’t know, Zoe, I mean, Elon was quoted as saying, “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open source safety-focused force for good it once was.” And Elon the savior here. Clearly in this case, we should take this at face value.

Zoë Schiffer: I think everything Elon says he falls to us. So I take it.

Michael Calore: I just think it’s really brash because it’s an unsolicited bid. The company was not out there looking to sell itself, and it’s essentially somebody walks up to your $1 million house, there’s no For Sale sign out front, knocks on the door and says, “I’ll give you 300 grand for it.”

Zoë Schiffer: Right, right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, when Sam was talking about this internally in messages that I saw, he was putting the word bid in scare quotes, which I thought was pretty funny and saying, “Yeah, basically Elon says a whole lot of things.” The insinuation was we’re not taking him very seriously. He said, “This is frankly embarrassing to watch.”

Lauren Goode: Sam said that?

Zoë Schiffer: To his employees.

Lauren Goode: Interesting.

Michael Calore: He also came out on X and said something about, “I wish he would compete.”

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, yeah. He was like, “I wish he would compete in the marketplace, not in the courtroom.”

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Sam said in a Bloomberg News interview, “I wish he would just compete by building a better product. Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity.” Shots fired. And he said he didn’t think that he was a happy person.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh. Is Sam Altman trying to compete to write the next Elon Musk biography? This feels like some Walter Isaacson level psychology.

Lauren Goode: I don’t know. Zoe, I have to say, every time I see something like this breaking in the news, these two guys fighting something with OpenAI, I quite literally hear your voice in my head from one of our earlier episodes going, “Messy, messy, messy.”

Zoë Schiffer: It is. It is so messy. I really had that this week when they were this whole swindler back and forth thing. I was like, you guys. I mean, I appreciate it. I like that we can see all of it, but at the same time, no comms team. Wow. Yeah, you can tell.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Now, we should probably just put out there too, that there are critics of OpenAI that think it’s completely over-hyped and overvalued who would look at that $157 billion valuation, even though it is based on private funding, that then just equates to a certain valuation and just say, there’s no way they’re worth that much. There’s no way that they can generate enough revenue in the next three to five years to justify that valuation.

Zoë Schiffer: I mean, have those people looked at Silicon Valley startups before? Do they know how this whole industry runs?

Lauren Goode: Right, exactly.

Michael Calore: Well, a big part of that conversation over the last month or so has been DeepSeek, right? The Chinese-owned chatbot competitor to ChatGPT.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Another moment where our bosses said, “What do we know about DeepSeek?” And we panic saying, “No idea. What is it? Never heard of it.” But yeah, I mean, this is a chatbot that launched on the scene. It’s basically made a model that competes very directly with OpenAI’s best reasoning models, but the company says that it trained it with a fraction of the specialized GPUs that OpenAI used, and at a fraction of the cost. Again, I feel like, Lauren, we need to put in the caveat. A lot of people dispute this. They don’t believe it, but that’s the idea. And the market reacts pretty intensely. Nvidia, which Lauren you have reported on extensively, their stock takes a bit of a hit.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, a bit of a hit. I forget how many billions they lost in value that day. It was like, whoops. Yeah. All of a sudden, Jensen Huang was going to Supercuts for his haircuts. Hold on a second. Stock drop after DeepSeek. Yeah. Supposedly it stock fell by around 17% on the news of DeepSeek, which I haven’t calculated how many billions that was, but it was a lot, $600 billion off of its value. People were very nervous about this, whether or not they could trust the information that was coming from China is a different question. But if it was true, then yeah, it rattled the AI market. And as a result, I think it was a week later, that’s when OpenAI decided to launch its o3-mini reasoning model, which means very little to people who aren’t following this very closely, but it was a way for them to say, look, we’re advancing the boundaries of what these smaller models can achieve, and smaller typically means less expensive. It apparently responded 24% faster than another mini model that OpenAI had put out. Its answers included 39% fewer mistakes. It was supposed to do more reasoning. And so I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of this. I also think we’re going to be seeing some of the big players in AI look to make strategic acquisitions of smaller AI companies as a rapid way of getting their tech up to speed to match whatever DeepSeek is doing.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Sam Altman went real founder mode in that moment. I mean, the company did say, “We’d been planning o3-mini for a long time,” but the framing of it definitely becomes like, “Oh, yeah, DeepSeek? Well, look at us.” Because the idea is, and the reason that Nvidia stock took such a hit is the whole way that the industry is heading is based on the idea that we need tons and tons of computing power. So if in fact there’s this big innovation and you can make these models more and more intelligent with a fraction of the chips and not a fraction of the cost, then it’s like, whoa, are we going to need as many chips in the future? Have we dramatically overestimated the AI infrastructure investments that we need to make? So a bit of an open question, although a lot of people would say, no more chips is more better.

Lauren Goode: Zoe, what are the rank and file inside of OpenAI saying about this skirmish, this messy, messy, messy between these guys?

Zoë Schiffer: Well, I think actually both moments, the DeepSeek moment and the Elon moment have galvanized people. I think OpenAI employees have a lot of pride in what they’re doing. They have a lot of pride and loyalty towards Sam Altman. And so when these players come up and they’re trying to unseat OpenAI as the leader in the space, you see employees really rally around and be like, okay, no, we’re going to do more. We’re going to go faster. We’re going to work harder. Which I mean, these people work really long hours. They work all the time.

Lauren Goode: How long are we talking here?

Zoë Schiffer: They work much more than us in the post inauguration period, which, if-

Lauren Goode: Wow.

Zoë Schiffer: … anyone knows how this newsroom was doing during that time, a lot.

Lauren Goode: Zoe just assume you have a live stream into their office that they don’t know about. You tap on the live stream and you check in.

Zoë Schiffer: There are people who’ve just done incredible reporting on this. But yeah, I think in the employee gossip reaction zone, I’m like, I’ve got a good handle on things.

Lauren Goode: And Zoe, where does Bret Taylor stand in all of this?

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my gosh. I can’t even believe I was about to skip over this. Okay, so when we’re talking about the OpenAI’s board’s reaction to Elon Musk’s unsolicited bid, we have to talk about Bret Taylor, former co-CEO of Salesforce, who was also chairman of the board at Twitter when Elon Musk tried to and then successfully acquired the company. So this is someone who had to put up with a lot of back and forth with Elon, a lot of public and private fights, and suddenly he’s installed as the board chair at OpenAI. And what happens, Elon Musk makes an unsolicited bid to buy that company too. So I imagine Bret Taylor is having quite a time right now, but arguably is also better equipped than most to handle this situation.

Lauren Goode: That’s right. Bret Taylor is also running his own AI startup now.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, they’re doing like agentic chatbot,

Lauren Goode: Agentic customer service chatbot. But yeah, so he’s deep in the AI world. Fun fact. I first interviewed Bret Taylor years ago when he was working on a little word processing app called Quip. Do you guys remember Quip?

Zoë Schiffer: No, but I’m incredibly jealous because I’ve reached out to him for a comment 5 billion times. Never a word.

Lauren Goode: I think he’s a lot busier now, maybe.

Zoë Schiffer: You’re saying he doesn’t have time for me?

Lauren Goode: No, this is years ago that I spoke to Bret. Yeah, Bret, we’re open to re-engaging.

Michael Calore: Okay, let’s take another break and we’ll come right back. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So Elon Musk has made this bid to purchase OpenAI for $97.4 billion, even though the company has a valuation that is much higher than that and is close to closing another round with SoftBank, that will change its valuation yet again. So does Elon’s bid change anything about OpenAI’s position in the market and its transition into this public benefit corporation?

Zoë Schiffer: I think we can just say that it makes it more complicated. Now, like we said before, there’s a floor on the price of OpenAI’s assets. Sam Altman as an insider in the space is going to have to come up with more money than that, or it could look a little bit weird. And I think we have yet to see, there’s a lot of speculation and the experts that I talked to when reporting on this story that Elon Musk’s goal is to just set a floor on the price of those assets to force Sam to pay more, but there’s also the possibility that he’s completely serious about this and is really going to try and force the issue. So I think it’s still a little bit TBD.

Michael Calore: Isn’t he busy? Doesn’t he have some things going on in his life right now?

Zoë Schiffer: No idea what you’re talking about.

Michael Calore: It definitely feels like the proverbial shot across the bow. Like Elon Musk and Sam Altman have been trading barbs. I think Elon is probably the spicier of the two of them with regards to the veracity of his barbs and the seriousness of his actions. To me, this does not feel like a genuine bid. It’s obvious from his past actions that he still wants to take control over the company, and this just feels like the latest move that he’s deploying to try and get control.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. This isn’t related to AI specifically, but did you guys hear how Tesla sales are cratering in Europe?

Zoë Schiffer: I did hear that.

Lauren Goode: Last month Norway recorded a 37.9% slump in Tesla sales. France sales fell by 63.4%. Spain, it gets worse, or better, Tesla sales plummeted by 75.4%.

Zoë Schiffer: Wait, and why do they think this is it?

Lauren Goode: It’s really hard to say. Companies are calling their fleet models. Some fan forum owners are selling their cars. Some people who were really big Tesla fans are selling their cars. It is hard to attribute it entirely to this, but people are saying that Musk’s increasingly alt-right stance, his various antics are starting to seriously impact his EV business there.

Zoë Schiffer: It’s so interesting because it’s the very thing that allowed Elon to stay on top, even when Tesla wasn’t doing as well from a business perspective. It was like his reputation was so tied to the company that the stock price would stay pretty high even when the company was going through bad periods. Now it’s like the fact that his reputation is tied so close to the company is really coming back to bite him a little bit, it looks like.

Lauren Goode: Yep. One of the sources quoted in the WIRED article said that, “While Musk might get away with a Nazi-like salute in some parts of the world, European markets reject such behavior.” Good for Europe.

Michael Calore: That really says a lot about us in the United States, doesn’t it?

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Although I was driving down Sand Hill Road the other day and was driving behind a Tesla that had a circle sticker on the back of it with Elon with a red line slashed through his name.

Zoë Schiffer: Interesting.

Michael Calore: Yes, those are very popular. There are a lot of people who are using the rear bumper of their Teslas to virtue signal that they do not support Elon Musk’s politics.

Lauren Goode: Yes. And up north of the city here in Marin, I saw a large sign on a store window that said, “Tesla is MAGA.”

Michael Calore: And I think it’s fine that we veered into politics because we can’t talk about Elon Musk without talking about the politics in the United States. And I have to wonder if Elon Musk’s position in the federal government right now has anything to do with why he’s interested in taking control of OpenAI.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I’m really curious to see how this plays out. Trump has appointed David Sacks, who’s a close Elon Musk ally, worked at PayPal with him back in the day, as the US AI and crypto tsar, so presumably someone that will be in charge of shaping AI regulations in the United States. And I think there’s concern from people who run competitive AI companies that perhaps these people will pass regulations that advantage xAI and disadvantage other companies. But this is all speculation right now.

Michael Calore: Well, wherever it goes, it’s probably going to play out in public. Elon Musk loves to go on X and shout at people and call names and retweet things that he agrees with or things that he disagrees with and comment on them. So we’re probably going to see more spicy tweets get fired between these two guys, and I am looking forward to that.

Zoë Schiffer: Well, the other thing that I was going to say is that Elon’s position in the government puts Sam Altman in a very interesting position, and I think because Sam Altman was pretty publicly anti-Trump. And then of course, Trump is reelected. The whole industry, at least the tech elite become more MAGA friendly, if you will. Sam Altman is now really trying to play nice. And one way that he does this is shortly after the inauguration, OpenAI announces Stargate, which is this planned $500 billion AI infrastructure project with a bunch of partners, including Nvidia and Microsoft and other players. And he allows Trump to take the credit for that project to get to announce it and talk about how important it’s going to be for jobs in the United States and the war to beat China and all of this stuff. Even though the project was underway during the Biden administration, they strategically plan it so that Trump can get credit. And to me it was like, oh, Sam Altman is trying to bypass Elon Musk and get right to Trump to make sure he’s not left out of the equation as stuff moves forward from a regulatory politics, all this stuff, perspective.

Michael Calore: It’s just a big game of chess.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.

Michael Calore: Well, Silicon Valley has had a lot of feuds between large ego-ed people, usually men, over the years, and I’m just wondering if there’s anything that we can compare this to. Is there anything that rises to the same level of wildness as this particular feud between Sam and Elon?

Zoë Schiffer: Large ego-ed people is the euphemism we use instead of saying men from now on.

Michael Calore: Having a large ego is not necessarily a bad thing. It just depends on how you apply it, right?

Lauren Goode: I mean, I think Gates and Jobs are probably the most famous ones, right? Because from pretty much the early days, Microsoft was making software for Apple computers, but then I think it was around the ’80s when Microsoft launched Windows and Jobs said that Microsoft was ripping off the Macintosh, right?

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: And that continued for a while. And what was the big fight over Flash, Mike?

Michael Calore: The big fight over Flash was that Steve Jobs hated it. He thought it was buggy. He thought it was a security risk, and he wanted the world to just use HTML embedded video instead of Flash and use the new spec for building web pages for interactions, because everybody had these Flash interfaces in the browser. And he went on this public campaign. He started blogging about how Flash was bad and how it should go away. And I think his big adversary at the time was Kevin Lynch, who was the executive at Adobe that ran the Flash software department, and they got into this public spat, and they were speaking on stage and they were both blogging and they were both being interviewed in the press talking about how the other company was wrong. And eventually Apple won. It said video and interactions on the open web is better than video and interactions through this janky plugin and Flash died and is no longer a part of the web. And now Kevin Lynch works at Apple and he runs the Apple Watch program.

Lauren Goode: I was going to say, is that the same Kevin Lynch at Apple? That’s hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg have been feuding lately too, although they’re not bloggy about it. Can you imagine Tim Cook writing a blog? I just-

Zoë Schiffer: No. I feel like Elon and Mark Zuckerberg also have their feud and the whole cage match thing.

Lauren Goode: That’s right. The cage match. Yes. And then this is also same category, but not as contentious. Evan Spiegel from Snapchat and Mark Zuckerberg, they don’t seem to be on super great terms. And then recently Evan Spiegel changed his LinkedIn bio to say that he was the VP of product for Facebook, which was making fun of how Facebook slash Meta steals all of Snapchat’s product ideas. The fact that Evan Spiegel actually took to LinkedIn to do that really says something. LinkedIn. Do you think that he got, what is it called when someone gives you accolades on-

Zoë Schiffer: Endorse.

Lauren Goode: …LinkedIn? Endorse. Do you think he got endorsements for that? I endorse Evan Spiegel for his sense of humor.

Michael Calore: That feels like as good of a place as any to end. I look forward to coming back and recording a follow-up episode when this saga continues in, I don’t know, three weeks.

Zoë Schiffer: I’m really excited for when this podcast is a booming success. And then later they’re like, “They all used to run a podcast together, and then there was this falling out.” And it was like we go to war, and then, they were having competing podcasts and, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Calore: Yeah, I’m going to try to convert Uncanny Valley into a nonprofit public benefit corporation.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. And going to come in and I’m going to try to buy your podcast for a fraction of what it’s worth.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, $9 specifically.

Michael Calore: I’ll sell you a pineapple. Thanks for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you liked what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. And if you’d like to get in touch with us to ask us any questions, leave a comment, or suggest a topic for the show, write to us at uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. If you want more great content from WIRED’s teams, we’ve got a great rec for you. This week, WIRED’s Global Editorial director, Katie Drummond will be joining Kara Swisher on the Pivot Podcast. Check it out. It goes live first thing on Friday, February 21st. Today’s show is produced by Kyana Moghadam with help from Gianna Palmer. Paige Oamek fact-checked this episode. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED’s Global Editorial director, and Chris Bannon is our head of Global Audio.