- Sam Altman says collaborating with others isn’t something Elon Musk is “most known for.”
- Altman cited Musk’s past behavior, when he’d dethroned Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person.
- Musk sent a silver medal emoji to Bezos via an X post in September 2021.
Sam Altman didn’t like it when Elon Musk made fun of Jeff Bezos after surpassing Bezos as the world’s richest person in 2021.
During an interview that aired Monday, podcaster Lex Fridman told Altman that AI’s big players must collaborate to achieve artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
But Altman raised a counterpoint that for Musk, collaborating with others is “not really the thing he’s most known for.”
“I was thinking, someone just reminded me the other day about how the day that he surpassed Jeff Bezos for richest person in the world, he tweeted a silver medal at Jeff Bezos,” Altman told Fridman.
“I hope we have less stuff like that as people start to work towards AGI,” he continued.
Back in September 2021, Musk told Forbes in an email that he would be sending Bezos a silver medal and a “giant statue” of the number “2” after dethroning him as the wealthiest man in the world.
Musk eventually sent Bezos a silver medal emoji via an X post in October. Bezos reclaimed the title in March, following a surge in Amazon’s shares.
Altman and Musk may have cofounded OpenAI together, but things haven’t been great between them lately. Musk’s view on Altman’s leadership of the OpenAI appears to have soured after he left the company’s board in 2018.
On February 29, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, where he accused the company of violating its nonprofit mission when it partnered with Microsoft.
Musk, meanwhile, hasn’t been very serious about the lawsuit on X, joking in a March 6 X post that he would drop the lawsuit if OpenAI changed its name to “ClosedAI.”
“I think that speaks to the seriousness with which Elon means the lawsuit, and that’s like an astonishing thing to say, I think,” Altman told Fridman, referencing Musk’s X post.
Representatives for OpenAI and Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
