OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called Elon Musk a bully, and in the same interview said he would “of course” still work with him. The remarks come from a wide-ranging Vanity Fair interview, as TheWrap reported on October 5. Altman said that “once in a while you’ve got to punch a bully back in the nose,” and that Musk only respects people who push back.
Asked about his own public jabs at Musk, Altman suggested Musk has been the less friendly of the two. Musk had not responded publicly to the interview at the time of the reports.
The offer to work together
Altman did not stop at the insult. He said he is willing to work with Musk, and that his whole company is too. He also argued that AI companies should cooperate with each other and with governments to build the technology safely, saying there may be a “window of public support” to do that.
How they got here
Musk and Altman started OpenAI together in 2015. Musk left the board in 2018, citing a possible future conflict with Tesla’s own work. In 2024 he sued OpenAI and Altman, saying the company had drifted from its public-benefit mission toward profit, and OpenAI countersued. In May, a federal jury found that Musk had missed the deadlines to bring his claims and ruled for OpenAI. We broke down the original dispute in our OpenAI lawsuit explainer.
The feud has also played out on X. The two traded barbs there as recently as July.
Our take: notice the order of the interview. The insult gets the headline, but the offer to cooperate came in the same breath, and it was aimed at a wider audience than Musk: regulators and the public. It also helps that Altman is speaking after OpenAI’s May courtroom win, which makes an open hand easier to offer. The two still compete directly, since Musk’s company builds the rival Grok chatbot, which we covered in SpaceXAI Is Becoming SpaceXSI. Whether any cooperation happens depends less on the quotes than on whether the lawsuits end.
