Elon Musk’s run as one of the luckiest people in the tech world was extended again Friday as the opera of OpenAI began to play out. Just as X/Twitter’s biggest advertisers were abandoning ship amid a(nother) apparent endorsement of an anti-semitic comment by Musk, the sacking of CEO Sam Altman stole the show from Friday onward. It had more twists and turns than an M. Night Shyamalan film—and Musk was on Twitter/X nonstop joking, laughing and commenting about the situation.
The flood of comments would be expected in any circumstance, given Musk’s ties to OpenAI. (He was a cofounder of the company but left the board in 2018 after a power struggle. Since then, he has taken shots at Altman regularly.) But the rapid pace of change and the media’s fascination with it distracted attention away from Musk’s most recent problems with X and advertising.
The vast majority of Musk’s tweets on the Altman matter consisted of a laughing emoji, typically in response to memes or search results on his own recently-launched Grok AI platform, but he didn’t hesitate to take a few veiled shots at Altman, sometimes by agreeing with other critical posts and sometimes more directly, voicing support for Ilya Sutskever, the board member who reportedly led the movement to dismiss Altman.
Exactly
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2023
I am very worried.
Ilya has a good moral compass and does not seek power.
He would not take such drastic action unless he felt it was absolutely necessary.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2023
OpenAI is not publicly traded and all the money in the world won’t matter if AI goes wrong
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2023
Musk also accepted praise from users claiming the world’s richest man foresaw the chaos at OpenAI, saying “I wish I was wrong.” He reiterated points he has made in the past about Microsoft taking control of OpenAI, altering the language a bit to say “Microsoft achieved de facto control of OpenAI some time ago. It is only becoming obvious now.”
And, in true Elon fashion, he made jokes.
He joked at Microsoft’s Clippy becoming sentient, saying the mascot “might paperclip us all!” and chuckled that Altman and Greg Brockman, who was sacked as chairman before resigning as president of OpenAI amid the chaos, would have to use Microsoft Teams now that they’re joining Microsoft. (Altman was even fired on Google Meet, Brockman said in his version of events, an implicit diss against OpenAI-backer Microsoft.) He even poked incoming CEO Emmett Shear, with a meme from the movie Office Space.
The chaos at OpenAI has also apparently meant some late nights for the Grok team, as they were seemingly pushed to advance the technology quickly, to capitalize on the changes in the AI world—and drive more paid users to Twitter/X, as those are the only people who can access to Musk’s AI program.
xAI is burning the 4am oil
LFG!!!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2023
