Startup
Elon Musk Can’t Stand Sam Altman, but He Just Made a Surprising Proposal
In the wake of his blockbuster SpaceX IPO, the world’s richest man discusses AI risks and rewards
Jul 24, 2026
Elon Musk. Photo:
Listen to this ArticleMore info
0:00 / 0:00
Elon Musk, who counts the artificial intelligence venture xAI among his many tech holdings, thinks the leaders of top AI companies should be collaborating more proactively around safety and alignment issues—even if he doesn’t actually like one of his industry peers very much
“The most immediate thing that we could do is to have the leading AI companies at least just meet, or have some sort of call, once every few weeks, and discuss any safety and security issues,” Musk said in a conversation yesterday with the editor-in-chief of The Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes, in which the two explored the risks and rewards of AI development
“I think the competitors can keep each other honest,” added Musk, who recently became the world’s first trillionaire following the IPO of SpaceX, his space exploration conglomerate and the parent company of xAI. (After a drop-off in the stock of that company as well as his electric car giant Tesla, his net worth now stands closer to $740 billion, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.)
In part, the idea of an AI executives summit seems to appeal to Musk as an alternative to government regulation, with the tech mogul explaining: “I think it’s quite difficult for someone in the government who doesn’t have a deep technical understanding and isn’t driving the frontier of AI, to know whether something should be released or not.”
Featured Video
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
Ideally, this sort of system would be put in place “immediately,” Musk adds—but when asked by Beddoes why he and his colleagues haven’t done so yet, Musk didn’t offer a clear answer
Personal animus, however, may be part of the equation
“I’m not a fan of Sam Altman,” Musk said. Indeed, he’s long had beef with Altman, who as CEO of the machine learning giant OpenAI represents one of Musk’s bigger competitors on the AI market
