After OpenAI was sued by Apple over allegations including theft of trade secrets, archrivals Sam Altman, OpenAI chief executive officer, and Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO, traded barbs on social media.
On the 11th (local time), Musk reposted on X (formerly Twitter) a report that Apple filed a lawsuit claiming OpenAI extracted Apple's secrets through employees who changed jobs, saying, "They really put a lot of effort into committing this crime." He added, "Altman has taken fraud to a whole new level."
Musk mocked Altman by posting an old photo of him saying, "I do this because I love it," adding, "What he means by 'this' is fraud," and "He may genuinely love scamming more than anyone else in this world."
After Musk provoked him, Altman fired back. Reposting Musk's message that criticized him for "taking fraud to a whole new level," Altman responded, "Homeboy, you're the one pitching stock market investors on building an orbital data center in the short term." The remark suggested Musk is a fraudster deceiving investors.
He was criticizing Musk for inflating valuation with a plan to build data centers in satellite orbit through SpaceX and its artificial intelligence (AI) institutional sector subsidiary SpaceXAI. Altman has previously said that building an orbital data center is unrealistic.
Musk has set a goal of putting AI compute infrastructure with an annual capacity of 1 GW (gigawatt) into orbit by the end of 2027, then expanding it to the terawatt (TW) level.
The two were OpenAI co-founders and were once close, but later clashed bitterly over how to run OpenAI.