A long-running feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman spilled out into the open this week as the AI billionaire heavyweights publicly fought over their rival companies.
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The latest round in the battle between the X CEO and the CEO of OpenAI began when Musk claimed that Apple had been favoring Altman’s AI app over his own in the Apple Store rankings.
“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation,” Musk said on X on Monday evening. “xAI will take immediate legal action,” he added, referring to the AI company he leads.
Earlier in the day, Musk called out Apple for not putting his X app or its generative AI chatbot system, Grok, on its recommended lists:
“Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?” he asked. “Are you playing politics?”
Apple said in an earlier statement that the “App Store is designed to be fair and free of bias.”
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Altman, who founded OpenAI with Musk in 2015 before Musk left the company, responded on X: “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.”
Altman included a link to a Platformer News article, which claimed that Musk had manipulated the X algorithm so that his tweets would be displayed more prominently to users and favor his interests.
The two got into it in the replies, with Musk accusing Altman of lying— “You got 3M views on your bullshit post, you liar, far more than I’ve received on many of mine, despite me having 50 times your follower count!”
To which Altman responded: “skill issue.” Altman then said he would apologize if Musk signed “an affidavit that [he has] never directed changes to the X algorithm” in ways that hurt his “competitors.”
Before falling out, Musk and Altman were once business partners. Musk has sued Altman and OpenAI twice since he departed from the company in 2018, for allegedly violating OpenAI’s founding mission to build AI in a way that benefits “all of humanity.”
Since then, the two have been increasingly at odds. After leaving OpenAI, Musk created his own AI company—xAI—which built Grok as a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT language model.