The battle between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, two tech billionaires at the forefront of the artificial intelligence race, took a personal turn in a recent interview.
When asked if he thought Musk’s targeting of OpenAI stemmed from insecurity, Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, told Bloomberg that “probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy. “I don’t think he’s a happy person.”
Musk, who owns xAI, put in a $97.4 billion bid for his rival OpenAI, which Altman rejected. Musk has a number of lawsuits against OpenAI, and he accuses the company of reneging on a previous commitment to being a nonprofit, referring to “Scam Altman”.
“I wish he would just compete by building a better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics,” Altman said in his Bloomberg interview. “Many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff, now this, and we’ll try to just put our head down and keep working.”
This war is far from over. With Altman urging Musk to focus on building a better AI product, who will win in the end? Newsweek asked some experts for their thoughts and here’s what they said.
Left, xAI’s Elon Musk delivers remarks as he join U.S. President Donald Trump during an executive order signing in the Oval Office at the White House on February 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. Right, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at a panel discussion on potentials, perspectives and challenges in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the Technical University (TU) in Berlin on February 7, 2025.
Nabil Jawdat Sarhan: OpenAI Is Increasingly Difficult to Compete With
As AI continues to surge in significance, the quest for AI dominance shows no signs of abating—whether it’s among corporations or between nations.
The well-known AI rivalry between the U.S. and China, as well as the competition between OpenAI and xAI, is just the tip of the iceberg. Numerous other conflicts, potentially even fiercer, are unfolding behind the scenes.
As the maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI holds the advantage of being the pioneer in making the world realize the true power and potential of AI.
Now, as the keystone of the $500 billion Stargate project, OpenAI has become increasingly difficult to compete with, making the prospect of acquisition, though unlikely, seem comparatively more viable.
Nabil Jawdat Sarhan is associate professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at at Wayne State University, and Director, Wayne State Computer Systems and Deep Learning Research Lab.
Stuart Russell: We’re All Losers in This War
Given our current state of understanding of how to control superhuman AI systems, no one will win: We will all lose, because we are likely to lose control over the systems they produce. As Altman has said, it’s “Lights out for all of us”.
Stuart Russell is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, and Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering; Professor of Cognitive Science; Professor of Computational Precision Health, UCSF; and Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.
Alexandra V. Mousavizadeh: Musk’s xAI Is Behind. His Overture to OpenAI Is Concerning
While we don’t know who is going to win, we do know that the future is in open source models, and that’s undermining OpenAI. Model prices are already trending down and future industry revenue will be in inference and agent-based AI.
Whatever his motivation, the OpenAI board will have a fiduciary responsibility to consider an offer from Musk or anyone else.
It’s not clear what Musk’s end game is. We do know that he is saying that AI is the hottest topic in town, but he doesn’t have skin in the game. xAI appears significantly behind OpenAI in development.
His motivation could be to control something very powerful or just to slow down OpenAI in order to allow XAI to improve—seize the new market opportunity—or to break up OpenAI and render his competition obsolete.
Regardless of his motivation, Musk’s overture should be concerning. Musk owning OpenAI would be problematic. Too much power would be concentrated into his hands and his decisions could have broad ramifications on the stock market.
Similarly to what happened with Twitter, we could also see customers decide to walk away if OpenAI were to fall in his hands.
Alexandra V. Mousavizadeh, CEO and co-founder, Evident.
Haym B. Hirsch: AI Has Room for Many Winners
There won’t be a single winner in the AI tech wars—there’s plenty of room for multiple winners. In addition to OpenAI and xAI other significant players in this space include Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, and Nvidia.
However, comparing OpenAI and xAI specifically, OpenAI is responsible for more of the innovative ideas permeating AI than is the case for xAI.
That means that OpenAI might be first to market with many AI innovations, but xAI also has talented people that keeps them timely in AI.
Haym B. Hirsh is a professor of computer science at Cornell University.
Elad Inbar: OpenAi and xAI Both Offer Tremendous Value
AI is evolving at lightning speed, faster than most of us can keep up with. Every day brings a new breakthrough or innovation that didn’t even exist a few days ago. In such a dynamic landscape, one company might lead today only to be outpaced by another tomorrow.
The real difference lies not in the ever-improving technical skills but in the underlying concepts driving each approach.
OpenAI seems to take a more mainstream route to handling information, while xAI is leveraging X’s vast pool of opinions to shape its training data.
But both companies offer tremendous value across a wide range of areas, from medical insights and coding expertise to reasoning and general knowledge.
Elad Inbar is founder and CEO of RobotLAB Inc.
Wedbush: Musk’s Bid Is a Fly in the Ointment for OpenAI
In a nutshell, Altman is the golden boy of the AI Revolution but Musk has massive power in the Beltway and this chain of events is likely just the start of a bigger soap opera poised to play out between Musk and Altman.
The AI Arms Race is heating up in Big Tech and OpenAI has a very strong market position which poses a risk to other tech players including Musk.
We would expect the OpenAI Board to formally reject this bid and continue its capital-raising process although the Musk-led bid is a fly in the ointment for Altman and OpenAI.
Comments from a note sent out by analysts at Wedbush Securities after Musk’s bid for OpenAI.
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