The fight goes back years and involves one powerful dude thinking the other has gotten credit he didn’t deserve.
It began when the pair collaborated and supported each other. But that faded as fast as a Spotify streaming record.
Since then the battle has played out as a Cold War with veiled digs behind the scenes, and in the past year burst onto the biggest stage with a high-profile lawsuit at its center.
No, not the feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. The feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, whose crafted insults and backstage machinations share more than a few spooky similarities with the biggest rap battle of our time.
Yes, Musk-Altman is Nerd Drake-Kendrick.
Or as one wag on Bluesky put it, “Like Kendrick and Drake if both of them were Drake.”
If you LOL-ed at that, you should. Drake and Kendrick, after all, is high-end entertainment. With its great rhymes and coded meanings — and a genuine mutual dislike that’s refreshing in this age of performative celebrity love — OVO-K.Dot has become the kind of drama even a Hollywood screenwriter couldn’t manage. (See also: the even more twisted appeal of Lively-Baldoni.)
As Musk attempts a $97.4 billion hostile takeover of Altman’s OpenAI, the pair are following the same bros-to-foes arc — co-founders of OpenAI back in 2015 when Altman was a 20-something entrepreneur (like a young Kendrick opening for Drake) but soon enmeshed in a rift. In 2024 they began dropping spicy social-media disses. If you can forget that what they’re really arguing about is which billionaire employs the best engineers — “Family Matters” vs “Not Like Us,” this ain’t — the feud will activate the same part of your limbic system.
But laugh now, cry later. Because when it comes to the broligarchs, the battles goes beyond entertainment and right into our lives.
The quick history: in 2018 Musk left (a then-not-for-profit) OpenAI because of a potential conflict of interest with Tesla’s AI system, leaving Altman to run the show. The next year, OpenAI created an unusual structure in which a for-profit arm operated under the non-profit board. Altman and fellow exec Greg Brockman said they needed to do this to attract talent; critics said it was a cash-grabby abandoning of the mission.
Musk, too, called out OpenAI for abandoning the mission, even if it also read as saltiness over his own forced abandonment of the spotlight. “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it ‘Open’ AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” he tweeted in February 2023, during peak ChatGPT-mania. “Not what I intended at all.”
The battle got legal as Musk first sued OpenAI in California state court last winter, dropped the suit after the publication of some revealing emails, then picked it up again last summer, this time in a federal lawsuit that alleged fraud and breach of contract. “The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” the lawsuit said, unrappishly.
With both Musk and Altman positioning themselves in Donald Trump’s front row, things got further heated when the president last month announced the Altman-friendly Stargate, a $500 billion Softbank-led project to fund OpenAI and other machine-intelligence projects. “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk quickly sniveled, which is at least a little closer to “My last record deal was 400 M’s/these days, that’s a low ball.” (Yeah, if you grudingly have to choose, Musk is Drake and Altman is Kendrick.)
Altman, watching Musk get close to Trump, has not been shy about pushing product releases in seemingly rapid response to Musk moves, kind of like how Kendrick drops tracks 20 minutes after Drake does. OpenAI released its latest GPT o1 (it has some … modest reasoning capabilities) last September right as Musk’s confederation with Trump was coming into its own. Trump, in the meantime, has seemed to enjoy sitting back and watching the conflict.
All of this brings us to Monday’s news of an investor group led by Musk attempting to buy the OpenAI non-profit. As THR reported, the bid seeks to position Musk as the leader OpenAI really needs; attorney Marc Toberoff said that, as the “most innovative and successful tech industry leader in history,” Musk was the “person best positioned to protect and grow OpenAI’s technology.”
Adding to the entertainment gloss: Ari Emanuel is in on Musk’s bid, along with a lot of investment funds. Emanuel is on record as calling Altman a “conman” and backing Musk’s version of events; he’s the Schoolboy Q of this saga. Both Musk and Altman, it should be noted, want to stay on Hollywood’s good side, thanks to all the ways studios could become customers. OpenAI recently released Sora, a text-to-video tool (you speak and video is created) which is the kind of thing Altman needs to convince studio types they should adopt in the face of artist warnings about job displacement and his company’s larger content-based legal challenges.
For his part, Musk has been trying to make nice in a Hollywood newly Trump-skeptical of him, most recently possibly banning Ye from X after David Schwimmer pled for that following the rapper’s anti-Semitic rants.
Now, there is some philosophy underlying all of this. In the semi-purposeless lingo of Silicon Valley, Altman is an e/acc, or effective accelerationist, which means he thinks all shackles should be removed from the pursuit of machine intelligence. Musk says he is an EA, or effective altruist, which means he (purportedly) thinks about the long-term good of humanity and would build regulation and safety into such pursuits.
Whether Musk is actually thus concerned or just worried that long-term Altman will get all the glory I’ll leave to your popcorn-munching halftime-watching mind. (Where is Sam Jackson when you need him?) But that, at least, is Musk’s line. Musk also has a competing company, xAI, which has tried, to mixed response, to make inroads on OpenAI, and which gives him just a little more skin in the game than all the mission-driven criticisms would suggest.
By many SV measures, Musk has more than Altman — $400 billion in paper wealth (Altman barely clears a billion), ownership of a prime social-media platform and, now of course, a massive perch from which to disrupt and decimate the federal government.
But Altman has something Kendrickian: cred. And influence. AI platforms in the not-too-distant future are going to be thinking for us — powering the apps we use, deployed in the workplace we tolerate, popping up to serve as our assistants and eventually companions. Whoever controls them doesn’t just control a big tech company: they control our lives. If OpenAI and its Microsoft ally/minority owner are the ones atop all this, as been shaping up to be the case, Altman has something Musk doesn’t have but desperately wants. Every car on the 405 could be a Tesla and Altman would still have a greater impact on our daily existence.
And so we have a battle for Musk to wrest control away from Altman or, at the very least, make it harder for him to separate OpenAI into a for-profit company.
So far Altman hasn’t taken the bait. Faced with Musk’s $97.4 billion dig at why Altman shouldn’t be the golden boy, Altman responded with a “No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” redirecting the knock at Altman’s (relative) lack of wealth back to Musk’s lack of investment value. (Or, in K.Dot terms, “I blew cool from e/acc.”)
Unlike Kendrick and Drake, at least the battle hasn’t turned to Musk’s paternity issues — yet.
Musk’s bid could well end up nowhere. Altman himself called out the game in an interview from a Paris AI conference Tuesday. “Elon tries all sorts of things,” he told Bloomberg. “This is the latest — you know, this week’s episode…I think he’s probably just trying to slow us down.” (Or slow down an upcoming $40 billion financing round.)
Indeed, like so many things Musk, it’s hard to tell if there’s actually a plan here or just a troll to grab back the spotlight. Buying OpenAI would certainly be a heavy lift. You can’t sway the organization’s board with money the way you could with Twitter; as a non-profit they don’t have to accept the highest offer. You can move them with politics, but Altman has proved very adept at that.
Also, Musk’s leveraged buyout for Twitter was infamously horrible, and do banks really want to repeat that debacle? Musk could trash Tesla stock in the process too, and it’s not like that’s going so great already.
So who should we want to control OpenAI? That depends on how you feel about this pair. Given the way Musk has run Twitter (or the federal government) and Altman has pressed ahead with accelerationism, you can decide which pill you’d rather swallow. Either way, the outcome will have far-reaching consequences. And serve as a reminder that these two men are not like, well, you know.