Elon Musk lost his case against Sam Altman in court. This weekend, he tried to win it back on X, one insult at a time.
The two men who founded OpenAI spent the weekend calling each other frauds in public. It played out on X, in real time, in front of millions. By the end Musk had branded Altman a “scammer” more than half a dozen times, Altman had turned the abuse into a marketing line, and X’s own head of product had piled in.
None of it was really about the law. It was about who gets to narrate the AI boom, and whose company the markets believe.
How it kicked off #
The trigger was a lawsuit, though not one of Musk’s. On Friday, Apple sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing hardware trade secrets. Musk pounced. “Scam Altman strikes again …”, he wrote, as CNBC’s Jordan Novet reported. Minutes later he doubled down: “He takes scamming to a whole new level”.
He then posted a photo of Altman captioned “I’m doing this because I love it”, adding his own gloss, “by this he means scamming”, with two laughing emojis. The finish came moments later: “He might literally love scamming more than any human alive!”
Altman hits back #
Altman did not let it lie. “[H]omeboy you’re the one sellling public market investors on short-term space datacenters”, he wrote, a jab at SpaceX’s plan to launch data centres into orbit, in a post that drew more than 11 million views. Musk replied that the first ones fly next year, and that Altman could come and watch “if your parole officer approves”.
Altman’s sharpest line reframed the whole row. Plenty of benchmarks suggested his new model was the best in the world, he wrote, “but the most reliable way to tell is that elon is obsessed with me again”.
The pile-on spread. When another user claimed Altman feared Apple, he replied that he was “not afraid of apple, but i have tremendous respect for them. s-tier company”. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, could not resist a dig at the lawsuit: “Incredible trade secrets as well, some of the best”.
Musk answered with a laughing emoji. He was not finished. “After stealing an open source AI charity, you then stole all of Apple’s phone technology! Wow”, he wrote, according to Business Insider. “What do you plan for an encore? That’s tough to beat”. OpenAI, for its part, said it had “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets”.
Why the grudge runs deep #
The venom has history. Musk and Altman started OpenAI together in 2015 as a non-profit. Musk left the board in 2018, then sued in 2024, accusing Altman and OpenAI of betraying that founding mission by turning the lab into a for-profit empire. The case went to trial this year. In May, a jury sided with Altman. Musk said he would appeal. He has since turned Grok into OpenAI’s loudest rival, now run inside SpaceX alongside X and Starlink.
The fight moves in-house #
It is not confined to Musk’s thumbs. He has also told Tesla staff to move to Grok for internal AI work, The Information’s Grace Kay reported, citing the model’s lower token costs and asking employees to email him feedback. Musk then disputed the framing on X. “Legacy media is misrepresenting the situation”, he wrote.
He had “asked Tesla & SpaceX to try out Grok 4.5 to see if it solves their task, not use it no matter what”, and staff “should continue to use other AI models if those models outperform Grok”. Even inside his own companies, the fight is half substance, half spin.
The timing is the tell #
None of it landed by accident. Both men shipped flagship models this week. OpenAI released GPT-5.6 Sol. SpaceX shipped Grok 4.5. The two labs sell rival products to the same customers, and both founders are heading for the markets. SpaceX has just raised a record $75bn in its debut.
OpenAI has filed confidentially for a listing of its own. Each has a reason to make the other look ridiculous. Not everyone thinks either lab deserves the noise. Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist, has called xAI a failure and warned of a bubble. That scepticism is part of why the fight is so loud.
The court case is over. The rivalry is not. Two men who built the same company now run the two loudest labs in AI, and neither can let the other go. The next round will not be settled by a jury. It will be settled by whose story the market believes.
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