The Information : Would Musk Be Better Than Altman at Running OpenAI?

Would Musk Be Better Than Altman at Running OpenAI?

Here’s a question: If you had to choose between Sam Altman and Elon Musk as the best person to safeguard the future of humanity, who would you pick? It’s a tough choice—you can be forgiven if you say neither. A (slightly) easier question is: If you had to pick one of them to run OpenAI, who would it be?

Conventional wisdom is that a Musk-led group’s bid for OpenAI on Monday night isn’t a serious offer but more of a way to complicate Altman’s effort to restructure the artificial intelligence firm. For the sake of argument, let’s assume it is real. Then the issue becomes one of price and, potentially, who is the best person to generate value from OpenAI. Given Musk’s accomplishments as an entrepreneur (you know the list: Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and so on), you would be hard pressed to discard him in favor of Altman.

That might be one reason why Altman is rejecting the bid by claiming, as we reported on Monday night, that it wasn’t in the “interest of OpenAI’s mission to develop advanced artificial intelligence for all of humanity.” (Musk has made a similarly pious argument in his lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI.) But this battle is essentially an extension of a longstanding argument between the two OpenAI co-founders, who split several years ago, well before the company became a juggernaut.

There’s plenty of precedent for disgruntled co-founders suing their former colleagues once their business becomes rich and famous (Reggie Brown at Snap and Eduardo Saverin at Facebook are just two examples). One difference in this situation is that Musk isn’t an also-ran—he’s even more successful as an entrepreneur than Altman is.

So when Altman pushes back, asserting that OpenAI “is not for sale,” investors in the company should wonder. Might they be better off with Musk? Maybe or maybe not. After all, OpenAI has had a revolving door as AI researchers have left for greener pastures, often firms started by OpenAI alum such as Mira Murati. Would Musk make the talent situation worse—or could he fix it?