- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was unsurprised by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s fallout with President Trump, telling reporters, “Elon busts up with everybody…that’s what he does.” After the Musk-Trump partnership unraveled, former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fortune this may have been inevitable given their “very powerful personalities and both have individual strength.”
As the Elon Musk and Donald Trump partnership grew closer and closer on the election trail last year, the primary question spectators were asking was: How long will this last? The second was likely to be: How large will the fallout be?
With President Trump now situated in the Oval Office and Musk nowhere to be seen in the White House after a tumultuous few months leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the duo seem to be in something of a cooling-off period.
It came after the Tesla CEO lambasted the decision-making of the White House, particularly over Trump’s so-called Big, Beautiful Bill, which he claimed undid all the budgetary efficiencies achieved by DOGE and would plunge the nation into further debt.
Musk also claimed Trump was named in the Jeffrey Epstein files—a statement he has since walked back, deleting his tweet. The president said he was “very disappointed” in the richest man on Earth and threatened to withdraw government subsidies from Musk’s private endeavors.
If there’s one person who saw the fallout coming, it was OpenAI’s boss Sam Altman.
“Elon busts up with everybody,” he told reporters yesterday, adding, “that’s what he does.”
When asked how the nature of his relationship stands with the SpaceX founder, Altman replied: “How do you think?”
Altman knows firsthand what it’s like to partner with Musk and then watch the bridges burn.
In 2015, the duo were among the founding partners of OpenAI.
In the following years, the relationship between Musk and Altman soured, with Musk departing in 2018 after reportedly trying to take over leadership of the company, which failed.
In 2023, Musk announced the launch of xAI, which subsequently released its chatbot, Grok, to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
By 2024, OpenAI and Musk were locked in a legal battle, with Musk later launching a bid to acquire OpenAI, to which Altman jokingly responded he would buy X—formerly known as Twitter—from Musk.
Musk, who has also founded brain implant company Neuralink, was further enraged when Altman and OpenAI were heavily involved in the launch of the White House’s $500 billion Stargate initiative, a large-scale project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.
Representatives for Musk did not respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
Altman facing challengers on all fronts
But Musk isn’t the only tech titan Altman is currently jostling with.
In recent weeks OpenAI has lost some of its top talent to Mark Zuckerberg’s super intelligence research lab at Meta, with Altman claiming some employees had been offered signing bonuses of up to $100 million.
When asked about how he was feeling about the talent war with a Big Tech rival, Altman responded yesterday that he felt “fine,” adding: “I mean obviously we have an incredibly talented team and I think they really love what they’re doing. Obviously, some people will go different places—there’s a lot of excitement, I guess you could say, in the industry.”
Altman added that he hadn’t spoken to Zuckerberg about poaching talent but expects to see him this week at the Sun Valley conference.
“Sooner or later”
The news of Musk and Trump’s almighty falling-out wasn’t news to those who have worked closely with the president either.
Wilbur Ross served as Commerce Secretary under the first Trump administration and spoke to Fortune exclusively last month.
He said that the clash between the world’s richest man and arguably the world’s most powerful isn’t particularly surprising, explaining: “Both are very powerful personalities and both have individual strength; in the case of Musk he has a bully pulpit through his social media, and he has the economic power that he wielded in the election. Trump obviously has the political power and the power of the office of president.
“So given that there was such powerful personalities and that each has its own almost separate power base [it’s] not surprising that sooner or later, they would have a bit of a falling-out.”
Musk had previously been jostling with members of the Trump team on issues like tariffs, outright opposing Trump 2.0’s headline policy and lambasting its architects, such as advisor Peter Navarro.
Ross added that despite such rifts, Trump respected some of the work Musk had done with DOGE: “I think Trump has made clear he does like what DOGE accomplished and indeed he’s continuing with a lot of the Musk people in further implementing those throughout the administration. I think there’s clearly a mutual respect between the two, but you know, even happily married people occasionally have a spat.”
Between Ross’s interview with Fortune and the time of writing, Musk has announced his intention to launch a new political party called the America Party, providing an alternative to Republicans and Democrats.
Trump has labelled this notion as “ridiculous,” saying it will add to political “confusion,” perhaps suggesting that a short-term spat between the pair may spin into a longer-term feud.
