Elon Musk and Sam Altman traded insults on X over the weekend, with Musk reposting an old "Scam Altman" tweet and Altman firing back with a dig about Musk's space data center plans. The exchange was trivial. The context around it is anything but.
Musk kicked things off Saturday by resharing a post from a user named DogeDesigner that showed one of his own older tweets warning people about Altman. "He takes scamming to a whole new level," Musk wrote.
Altman shot back minutes later. "Homeboy you're the one selling public market investors on short-term space datacenters," the OpenAI CEO posted. The name-calling is familiar territory.
Musk first called Altman "Scam Altman" in April after a New Yorker investigation questioned Altman's credibility on AI safety. The two have been trading public jabs for years, but this latest round lands in a radically different environment.
Apple sued OpenAI days ago, alleging the company used job interviews and former employees to obtain hardware trade secrets related to its consumer device plans. Musk, who cofounded OpenAI in 2015 before leaving, seized on the lawsuit to accuse Altman of taking over an open-source AI charity and stealing Apple's phone technology. The legal backdrop is personal for Musk.
He sued OpenAI and its leaders in 2024, accusing them of abandoning the nonprofit mission. The case went to trial earlier this year, and a jury rejected his claims, ruling he waited too long to file.
Business Insider reports that OpenAI will roll out its GPT-5.6 family of models more widely on Thursday, following a Trump administration request to stagger the release. The models come in three tiers: Sol (flagship), Terra (everyday work), and Luna (speed and affordability).
Hours after OpenAI's announcement, Musk said SpaceXAI would launch Grok 4.5 in the coming days, describing it as an "Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost."
Google is also planning to release Gemini 3.5 Pro later this month. The dueling model launches mean this week's public spat isn't just noise. Both companies are racing to ship their most advanced systems to the same enterprise customers, and both are betting on efficiency as a selling point.
Musk lost the legal fight. Now he's fighting for market share.
