The Showdown Between Elon Musk and Sam Altman

Lauren Goode: Sam said that?

Zoë Schiffer: To his employees.

Lauren Goode: Interesting.

Michael Calore: He also came out on X and said something about, “I wish he would compete.”

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, yeah. He was like, “I wish he would compete in the marketplace, not in the courtroom.”

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Sam said in a Bloomberg News interview, “I wish he would just compete by building a better product. Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity.” Shots fired. And he said he didn’t think that he was a happy person.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh. Is Sam Altman trying to compete to write the next Elon Musk biography? This feels like some Walter Isaacson level psychology.

Lauren Goode: I don’t know. Zoe, I have to say, every time I see something like this breaking in the news, these two guys fighting something with OpenAI, I quite literally hear your voice in my head from one of our earlier episodes going, “Messy, messy, messy.”

Zoë Schiffer: It is. It is so messy. I really had that this week when they were this whole swindler back and forth thing. I was like, you guys. I mean, I appreciate it. I like that we can see all of it, but at the same time, no comms team. Wow. Yeah, you can tell.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Now, we should probably just put out there too, that there are critics of OpenAI that think it’s completely over-hyped and overvalued who would look at that $157 billion valuation, even though it is based on private funding, that then just equates to a certain valuation and just say, there’s no way they’re worth that much. There’s no way that they can generate enough revenue in the next three to five years to justify that valuation.

Zoë Schiffer: I mean, have those people looked at Silicon Valley startups before? Do they know how this whole industry runs?

Lauren Goode: Right, exactly.

Michael Calore: Well, a big part of that conversation over the last month or so has been DeepSeek, right? The Chinese-owned chatbot competitor to ChatGPT.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Another moment where our bosses said, “What do we know about DeepSeek?” And we panic saying, “No idea. What is it? Never heard of it.” But yeah, I mean, this is a chatbot that launched on the scene. It’s basically made a model that competes very directly with OpenAI’s best reasoning models, but the company says that it trained it with a fraction of the specialized GPUs that OpenAI used, and at a fraction of the cost. Again, I feel like, Lauren, we need to put in the caveat. A lot of people dispute this. They don’t believe it, but that’s the idea. And the market reacts pretty intensely. Nvidia, which Lauren you have reported on extensively, their stock takes a bit of a hit.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, a bit of a hit. I forget how many billions they lost in value that day. It was like, whoops. Yeah. All of a sudden, Jensen Huang was going to Supercuts for his haircuts. Hold on a second. Stock drop after DeepSeek. Yeah. Supposedly it stock fell by around 17% on the news of DeepSeek, which I haven’t calculated how many billions that was, but it was a lot, $600 billion off of its value. People were very nervous about this, whether or not they could trust the information that was coming from China is a different question. But if it was true, then yeah, it rattled the AI market. And as a result, I think it was a week later, that’s when OpenAI decided to launch its o3-mini reasoning model, which means very little to people who aren’t following this very closely, but it was a way for them to say, look, we’re advancing the boundaries of what these smaller models can achieve, and smaller typically means less expensive. It apparently responded 24% faster than another mini model that OpenAI had put out. Its answers included 39% fewer mistakes. It was supposed to do more reasoning. And so I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of this. I also think we’re going to be seeing some of the big players in AI look to make strategic acquisitions of smaller AI companies as a rapid way of getting their tech up to speed to match whatever DeepSeek is doing.