The 2004 movie "Mean Girls" taught us that high school girl world is just as cutthroat as the animal kingdom. It turns out, the world of AI leaders isn't that different, either.
Sam Altman and Elon Musk have been beefing like the movie's teenage characters this week — so much so that my colleague Henry Chandonnet took the time to cobble together a burn book of all the petty jabs and posts the AI players have slung at each other.
But "Mean Girls" is more than just a useful analogy for the feuds between these billionaire CEOs. It can also help us model the power dynamics among all of the major AI players.
If Silicon Valley is just like the fictional North Shore High School, then maybe Altman, Musk, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are its Plastics — the titular mean-girl clique consisting of Regina George (played by Rachel McAdams), Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert), Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried), and Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan). But as "Mean Girls" has taught us, there can only be one Queen Bee. So who is it? Some might say Musk is the obvious choice. The richest man in the world and CEO of multiple companies. Hello? His relationship with Sam Altman has followed a similar trajectory to the Cady-Regina relationship in the movie: first they were business partners at OpenAI, when Altman was an obscure name. Now, they're bitter rivals through battles in the courtroom and the court of public opinion.
Others might say Musk's public meme-sona puts him more in line with Karen, "one of the dumbest girls you'll ever meet," per the original movie. The guy who named a short-lived government agency DOGE, after a derpy dog and made a show of jumping for joy on stage at campaign rallies has a certain, say, exuberance that Karen had in the movie.
Altman had his own Regina arc way back in December 2023, when he was briefly ousted as OpenAI CEO. After he was reinstated,** **OpenAI made it harder to fire him, effectively consolidating his power.
More recently, Altman whacked Musk with a Regina-ism on X. He said the most reliable way to tell that OpenAI's latest model is the best in the world "is that elon is obsessed with me again."
OpenAI is one of the most valuable private companies. In "Mean Girls" speak, that makes Altman very, very popular. The kind of popular where, if I saw Altman wearing Prada sunglasses at the Sun Valley billionaires' summer camp, I might start wearing Prada sunglasses, too.
If we're being honest, Regina probably isn't Amodei, who seems to spend more time looking stressed out than engaging in beef on X with his peers. He could be Gretchen, who in the movie wielded a great deal of power but was afflicted by serious anxiety. Amodei has spent a lot of time warning Washington about the dangers of the thing he's building. What does he know? Is his hair so big because it's full of AI secrets? (Anthropic and the other companies in this story didn't immediately respond for comment, so we'll probably never know.)
There's no shortage of entrants for who could be the Cady Heron of Silicon Valley. One is Cursor CEO Michael Truell, the soft-spoken yet ambitious 25-year-old who just threw in his lot with Musk.
Another is Ilya Sutskever, who cofounded OpenAI but left in 2024. He was one of the board members who voted to fire Altman in 2023, but later changed his mind. Sounds like frenemy behavior to me.
I know what you're thinking: Where does Jensen Huang fit into all of this? Huang does not concern himself with the beef between the Plastics. Therefore he is not a part of girl world. He is Aaron Samuels, the hot guy everyone wants to make deals with.
Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, is spiritually closest to Regina's mom, played by Amy Poehler in the movie. Deeply concerned with his public perception and running a company that came late to the AI game, he's not a regular tech CEO. He's a cool tech CEO.
Who do you think is the real Regina George of Silicon Valley? Is it Sam Altman or Elon Musk, or did I get it dead wrong? Let me know in the comments.