It’s Silicon Valley’s most prolonged breakup, this continuing saga of Sam Altman and Elon Musk, co-founders turned courtroom combatants — over not just OpenAI but the future of AI itself. The kind where one side moves on, launches a new company, builds a massive global brand, gets the world talking — and the other keeps showing up uninvited at the party, refusing to get over and move forward.
This week, OpenAI filed a countersuit against Musk, asking the court to formally hit pause on what it described as a campaign of “unlawful and unfair action.” Sam Altman is basically saying here that enough is enough to Elon Musk.
Also read: OpenAI says Elon Musk is harassing them, asks court to stop him
The lawsuit, filed in California, claims Elon Musk’s recent moves — including a dramatic $97.4 billion “takeover bid” in February 2025 to acquire OpenAI’s nonprofit arm — weren’t just stunts. They were calculated disruptions. The company even called the bid “fake,” designed to interfere with OpenAI’s future plans. If the original lawsuit Musk filed in 2024 was about “mission drift,” this countersuit is about harassment.
“Musk’s continued attacks on OpenAI, culminating most recently in the fake takeover bid designed to disrupt OpenAI’s future, must cease,” the countersuit reads.
This is where we’re at. Where Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the same two men who once built OpenAI together with a dream to make artificial intelligence safe for all of humanity, are now battling over whether that mission has lost its way — or whether one of them just can’t let go.
Elon Musk vs Sam Altman and OpenAI: A timeline of feud
Let’s rewind for a second, and understand how it all went wrong for Elon Musk with respect to OpenAI, and how the relationship between him and Sam Altman further deteriorated over the past few years.
Back in 2015, Sam Altman and Elon Musk were part of the founding dream team of OpenAI — a nonprofit set up with the noble (and very Muskian) mission to keep AI beneficial to humanity. Not necessarily profitable. Just safe, fair, and accessible.
But in 2018, Elon Musk stepped down from the OpenAI board. On paper, it was to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla’s own AI developments. Behind the scenes, there were disagreements — over OpenAI’s long term direction, over leadership, and (according to various reports) over OpenAI’s control. Since then, their relationship has gone from quietly tense to publicly toxic.
In 2023, Elon Musk launched xAI to build Grok, a ChatGPT rival that’s part AI assistant, part Twitter troll. By early 2024, he’d accused OpenAI of selling out — saying it had gone from nonprofit to profit-first, losing its moral compass. He filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, later withdrawing it. Then refiled it, adding Microsoft for good measure.
In January 2025, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump to unveil the Stargate initiative — a mind-bending $500 billion project to build AI data centers. The next day, Elon Musk called Sam Altman a “swindler” and “liar.” Because of course he did.
Elon Musk vs Sam Altman: Root of the grievance
At the heart of Elon Musk’s grievance is his strong belief that OpenAI has strayed from its founding mission. What started as a nonprofit has now morphed into a capped-profit model, with plans to shift into a public benefit corporation — meaning it’s still mission-oriented, but with revenue goals attached.
Also read: Stargate to OpenAI: Why Elon Musk and Sam Altman are still fighting
OpenAI doesn’t see this as betrayal from its core mission — it sees it as necessary evolution. After all, training models like GPT-4 or its upcoming successors isn’t a weekend side project. It takes massive compute, elite talent, and yes, funding. A lot of money is the basic fuel driving the engine of cutting-edge AI evolution, whether you or Elon Musk likes it or not.
For Altman, OpenAI’s “nonprofit wrapper with a for-profit engine” may seem like a compromise, but it’s one he believes is essential for competing with Big Tech while staying true to the mission. Musk, on the other hand, appears to believe that anything short of open-sourcing everything and handing it back to the community is a betrayal.
But here’s the paradox. The man who claims OpenAI is no longer open also runs a competing AI company — one that isn’t open source either. And while Grok, the edgy sibling of ChatGPT, is free for all X users, it does have a paid version with X Premium which offers more features. Elon Musk’s moral crusade is also a business play, at the end of the day.
Time to move on?
This week’s countersuit makes it clear that OpenAI has had enough. It accuses Musk of a campaign that’s less about accountability and more about disruption. The courts, of course, will now have to untangle all the mess, as the jury trial is set for early 2026, which in tech years is basically a whole new generation of AI models away. By then, GPT-6 might be in preview mode, as Elon Musk takes his own giant strides on the AI front.
Maybe it’s time both men bury the hatchet and let this one go.
Sam Altman has OpenAI to run. He’s leading arguably the most influential AI company on the planet, working on models that will shape education, creativity, communication, and perhaps a lot more. Elon Musk has his hands full too — there’s SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, Neuralink, and a rapidly evolving platform in X that seems determined to merge memes and machine learning into the future of social news.
But maybe, just maybe, the energy spent fighting each other could be better used actually building the futures they are so invested in. Because, the world’s got enough problems without two of its smartest minds wasting time in a digital shouting match over who said what in 2015.
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Jayesh Shinde
Executive Editor at Digit. Technology journalist since Jan 2008, with stints at Indiatimes.com and PCWorld.in. Enthusiastic dad, reluctant traveler, weekend gamer, LOTR nerd, pseudo bon vivant. View Full Profile
