Sam Altman says he doesn’t care about Elon Musk as ChatGPT beats Grok in chess

Sam Altman didn’t even try to hide how little he cares about Elon Musk. Hours after his company’s AI crushed Elon’s Grok in a chess tournament, Sam went on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” and, when asked about Elon’s latest shot at OpenAI, said flatly, “You know, I don’t think about him that much.”

He didn’t stop there. “I thought he was just, like, tweeting all day [on X] about how much OpenAI sucks, and our model is bad, and, you know, [we’re] not gonna be a good company and all that.”

The exchange came one day after Satya Nadella announced that OpenAI’s newest model, GPT-5, will be baked into Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, and the standalone Copilot. Elon responded on X with his prediction that “OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive.”

Satya wasn’t having it, replying, “People have been trying for 50 years, and that’s the fun of it! Each day you learn something new, and innovate, partner, and compete.” He even threw in a nod to Elon’s Grok 4 chatbot, which is already on Azure in a limited preview.

Microsoft rollout triggers another round in the feud

Sam and Elon have been trading blows for years. They started OpenAI together back in 2015 as a nonprofit AI lab, but split when they disagreed over its direction.

OpenAI later shifted toward a for-profit model, pulling in Microsoft as its biggest backer. Elon went on the offensive this year with a lawsuit claiming breach of contract, then dropped it.

Not long after, Elon led a group that tried to buy the nonprofit controlling OpenAI for $97.4 billion. Sam rejected the offer publicly with, “No thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Speaking to CNBC at the time, Sam called the bid an attempt to “slow down a competitor.”

Now, Microsoft’s integration of GPT-5 is set to give OpenAI’s tools even wider reach. Elon’s comment about OpenAI “eating Microsoft alive” landed just as Satya spoke. The timing kept the public feud alive, with each side digging in through statements and posts.

In a tournament built to see which general-purpose AI could handle chess, OpenAI’s o3 model had beaten Elon’s Grok 4 in the final. These weren’t traditional chess engines but AI systems built for everyday tasks, thrown into a different kind of test.

The o3 model went unbeaten. In the final, Grok 4 made several errors, including losing its queen more than once, which sealed its loss. Google’s Gemini came in third after knocking out another OpenAI entry in an earlier round.

Chess has long been a way to measure a computer’s ability to plan and calculate. This contest showed how far, and how far behind, these multipurpose AI tools can be when given a structured, rules-based challenge. Despite the mistakes, both Sam and Elon still claim their latest AI models are the smartest in the world.