Featured Image Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty
While Elon Musk and Sam Altman might be BFFs in some alternate reality, there's no love lost between the warring tech bros as their public feud spills out from the courtroom and onto our social media timelines.
Altman is known as a co-founder and current CEO of OpenAI, which is an artificial intelligence giant that's currently facing stiff competition from all sides. Away from Google's Gemini coming on leaps and bounds, Elon Musk's xAI has also muscled into the market. Notably, the world's richest man released his Grok chatbot, which is billed as something of a 'sassy' ChatGPT alternative.
Grok has faced numerous controversies during its relatively short lifespan, and most recently, there have been calls to ban X in several countries after officials confirmed it had inadvertently been creating NSFW images of minors.
It's hard to keep track of who's suing who, especially as other tech Goliaths like Apple and Microsoft are dragged into various lawsuits, but at the crux of it, Elon Musk initiated legal proceedings against Altman.
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He accused Atlman and others of defying OpenAI's initial mission statement to 'save' humanity, initially filing a lawsuit in February 2024, dropping it, and then picking it up again.
As things rumble on, Musk hasn't been afraid to share his views on Altman and ChatGPT online.
Musk has previously branded ChatGPT as 'diabolical' when referring to the murder-suicide case of Stein-Erik Soelberg.
Now, he's implied that the AI chatbot is 'dangerous' as he encourages people not to let their loved ones use it. It comes in the aftermath of several deaths being linked to ChatGPT, including seven wrongful death lawsuits that were filed in November 2025 alone.
Even though Musk doesn't mention Grok in his latest takedown of ChatGPT, many in the replies call out the fumbles that his own chatbot has made.
The jibe has also landed on Altman's radar, who took the opportunity to question both Grok and the safety record of Musk's Tesla.
Although Altman is no stranger to mocking Tesla over his 'missing' Roadster order, his latest jab is altogether more serious.
Highlighting Tesla's self-driving technology, Altman wrote: "Apparently more than 50 people have died from crashes related to Autopilot.
“I only ever rode in a car using it once, some time ago, but my first thought was that it was far from a safe thing for Tesla to have released."
The mud-slinging continued as he added: "I won’t even start on some of the Grok decisions. You take ‘every accusation is a confession’ so far.”
Elsewhere, Altman said that almost a billion people use ChatGPT and mentioned how some might be in 'very fragile mental states'. Addressing concerns about deaths linked to the chatbot, Altman reiterated: "We will continue to do our best to get this right and we feel huge responsibility to do the best we can, but these are tragic and complicated situations that deserve to be treated with respect."
It's important to note that while Musk makes these accusations about ChatGPT, they're yet to be universally verified by independent investigations.
As for the ongoing legal quagmire, Musk is seeking $134 billion amid claims that he was 'defrauded' into helping found OpenAI.
The latter maintains that Musk is 'grossly misrepresenting' events, and in a recent blog post, said this is “part of a broader strategy of harassment aimed at slowing us down and advantaging his own AI company."
