Sam Altman calls Elon Musk “a bully” and says not taking OpenAI shares was a mistake

Sam Altman has called Elon Musk a bully who sometimes needs “to punch a bully back in the nose”, and admitted that owning no stock in OpenAI was a mistake, in a two-part interview with Vanity Fair published on Monday.

The OpenAI chief spoke to the magazine’s global editorial director, Mark Guiducci, in San Francisco on September 11 and again on October 2. Vanity Fair notes that OpenAI has a content agreement with its owner, Condé Nast.

“I think Elon’s a bully”

Asked about the way AI leaders behave towards each other, including his own swipes at Musk on X, Altman said he would still work with the SpaceXAI boss, but not on Musk’s terms:

Look, I don’t like bullies, and I think Elon’s a bully. And so I think once in a while you got to punch a bully back in the nose.

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, to Vanity Fair

Musk, he added, “like many bullies, only respects people who do”, so “if you want me to be able to work with him, maybe you should be happy I hit back once in a while”. Later he said that even though he thinks “Elon is not nice”, he and OpenAI are willing to work with both Musk and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Musk hasn’t responded publicly.

“I wish I had just taken the stock”

Altman confirmed he has “no direct equity” in OpenAI, only a “tiny, tiny sliver of exposure from an old YC investment”, and said that choice had backfired as the company prepares to go public:

I think it was a mistake and a lack of understanding of how most people think about the world and weirdly, this big trust-destroying thing to not have equity.

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, to Vanity Fair

He said he likes “nice stuff” and has “expensive taste”, but that his reward is having “the most interesting, coolest, most impactful job that anyone in the world has right now.” He also put this year’s run of executive departures down to growth, saying people who are “great at one stage of a company” are not always right for the next.

Slowing down, together

Asked whether he would press a button to pause AI alongside his American and Chinese rivals, Altman said US companies would need “things like antitrust exemptions to be able to talk about slowing down together”. He said OpenAI is talking to safety teams at other labs and to the government, and that a deal between the US and China on “shared safety standards and requirements to verify compliance” would be “an incredible step”.

On extinction, he said “the fact that it is a non-zero” risk is something “we all should take incredibly seriously”, while warning that some people use it “to justify power seeking, power concentration”. He brushed off former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s charge that OpenAI hasn’t internalised the stakes (“this guy’s entitled to his opinion”), and said he did not ask Greg Brockman to pull his $25 million pledge to the Leading the Future super PAC.

On Xi Jinping’s state visit, Altman said he was “not in the room for the substantive conversations” and didn’t know what came out of them. Asked about warnings that critics say OpenAI ignored, he said he would make “many individual decisions that you’re clearly not going to like… You can come try making them all; they’re not so easy.”

Why it matters

The interview lands a day after Altman told Politico the world should accept “some bad things happening” in return for AI’s benefits. Together they show OpenAI’s chief trying to sound both safety-minded and impatient with critics as his company heads for a stock market listing, and his open feud with Musk shows the industry is far from the united front the White House’s self-regulation accord assumes.

Sources: Vanity Fair (part 1), Vanity Fair (part 2).