Elon Musk’s “Whole Life Is From A Position Of Insecurity,” Taunts Sam Altman As AI Wars Heat Up, “I Feel For The Guy”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman again shrugged off Monday’s $97 billion hostile takeover bid by Elon Musk saying the company “is not for sale.”

“Elon tries all sorts of things,” he told Bloomberg Television from France on the sidelines of the Paris AI Action Summit. Musk is “trying to slow us down. He is obviously a competitor. He … raised a lot of money for xAI and they’re trying to compete with us,” he said, as the so-called streaming wars are now being overshadowed by the battle for AI.

“I wish he would just compete by building a better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics, many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff. Now this. And we’ll try to just put our head down and keep working.”

Musk is heading a consortium of investors including Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel in a bid for the ChatGPT parent. OpenAI started as a nonprofit but with charitable donations alone unable to fund the billions needed to grow artificial intelligence, Altman created a subsidiary to take on third-party investors, an entity that is still controlled by the nonprofit board. OpenAI is looking to remove further restrictions on fundraising and contemplating changes in the structure to do that.

Musk, who founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015, says Altman is betraying its charitable mission and sued. He also made that unsolicited bid for the nonprofit.  

“We view this bid as not competitive but with the intention to slow down the OpenAI capital raising process as the Board now has to look at this bid even though the valuation is likely closer to $300 billion,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.

“With Musk’s existing lawsuits against OpenAI to block the company’s transition to a for-profit entity, Altman and Musk’s current feud continues to heat up as this battle heads to court with the judges now deciding whether the company is fulfilling its non-profit mission of developing AI to benefit humanity rather than focus on making money.”

Altman insisted to Bloomberg that “no matter what, the nonprofit will continue to be extremely important” as the board explores options of “how to best structure for this next phase.”

Asked if, given the competitive AI landscape, he thinks Musk’s approach is from a position of insecurity about xAI, Altman responded: “Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy.”

“You feel for him?” the interview asked.

“I do, actually. I think he’s like, not a happy person. I do feel for him.”

He said he doesn’t worry about Musk’s proximity to President Donald Trump. “Maybe I should, but not particularly. I mean, I try to just wake up and think about, like, how we’re going to make our technology better.”

Altman also dismissed jitters over the sudden explosion of cheaper Chinese ChatGPT rival DeepSeek, whose emergence briefly tanked tech stocks earlier this month.

It’s a good model, he acknowledged. But “I feel so confident about our research roadmap and also our product roadmap that you know DeepSeek will do whatever DeepSeek is going to do. Other people will do whatever they’re going to do. And we’re just going to try to build the best technology we can and get it into people’s hands.”