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Inside the rotunda at Donald Trump’s second inauguration the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, went down the line shaking hands with each tech billionaire who showed up to kiss the ring — all except Elon Musk.
It was an odd slight from Kushner to pass over the man who just spent $290 million of his own money to help get Trump elected, while the others — Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — had traditionally backed Democrats or leaned with Silicon Valley’s liberal culture.
Two days after the inauguration, Musk’s very public budding bromance with the Commander-in-Chief was dealt another blow when the president announced an ambitious $500 billion AI data center deal, Stargate, in a joint venture with tech giant OpenAI — icing out Musk’s own budding AI company.
“He hates one of the people in the deal,” Trump bluntly told reporters of Musk during a press conference about Stargate.
Trump was referring to OpenAI boss Sam Altman. Musk, boss of Tesla and Space X, immediately took to the social media platform he owns, X, to call Altman a “swindler” and a “liar” and claimed Stargate didn’t have the funds it purported to.
One tech industry insider who spoke to The Post suggested Musk’s entire election year blitz — which saw him become a MAGA superstar overnight through his get-out-the-vote operations and high-profile appearances with Trump — had less to do with politics and more to do with currying favor away from Altman.
A former associate of Musk agrees that he never seemed political before 2024: “Politics is a backstabbing world, and I was really shocked that Elon got involved in it.
“The Elon I knew was very libertarian, a live-and-let-live sort of attitude, not particularly right or left. I suspect some of the politics with him are just who he’s around.”
Perhaps he didn’t realize how entrenched Altman is with the Trumps. Jared’s brother, Joshua, through his Thrive Capital is one of OpenAI’s more significant financial backers, making a series of investments between 2022 and 2026 totaling well over $2 billion.
And once Musk had a brief fall out with Trump in June 2025, Altman was quick to step in and by September was accompanying the president to the UK to discuss AI initiatives.
Aside from the politics, insiders say Musk doesn’t have time for people who aren’t hands-on like he is.
“He doesn’t like people [like Altman] who don’t have a hand in building stuff. The lawyers, the recruiter-types, the businesspeople, the posers and pontificators, he definitely looks down his nose at them.”
“He’s going to see someone like [Altman] as a necessary evil [in Silicon Valley].”
Those close to Altman paint him in a better light, as a tycoon whose superpower lies in salesmanship and talent scouting, rather than the technical aspects of the AI world.
“You probably could have said the same about Steve Jobs, right?” former OpenAI safety researcher Scott Aaronson told The Post.
“That he was merely a manager and not a tech guy. There’s a long history of such people who are able to put together and inspire a team that can have a huge impact.”
“I think everyone would agree that [Altman] is not a deep technical thinker. He’s obviously very intelligent, you can talk to him about any technical thing he will listen and ask good questions,” added Aaronson.
Musk and Altman had originally worked together. Musk, then on his way to becoming the richest man in the world, was an early donor and co-founder of OpenAI in 2015. He claims he put in $38 million in seed money and recruited top talent for the project, which was then a non-profit.
What happened next is at the center of the lawsuit which will come to a head in an Oakland, Calif., federal courtroom later this month.
Musk is suing OpenAI, Altman, co-founder Greg Brockman and the company’s biggest investor, Microsoft, which owns a 27% stake in the company.
He alleges in the lawsuit he was “manipulated” by “Altman’s “long con” and OpenAI has breached its founding nonprofit mission — to develop AI for humanity’s benefit and not for profit — by shifting to a for-profit structure and partnering closely with Microsoft.
In 2018, after Altman named himself president of OpenAI, Musk publicly stepped down from its board of directors, stating a conflict of interest as he was starting his own AI operation for his car company Tesla’s autonomous driving program. Since that time he’s also launched his own commercial venture, Grok AI, which partners with X.
Five months before his departure, Musk wrote in an email to OpenAI brass: “Guys, I’ve had enough […] Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit” adding, “I’m just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup.”
Sources told The Post Musk feels he’s found himself in the position of having funded his own AI competition — further fueling his animosity toward Altman.
“Elon values loyalty above all,” a former close associate of Musk told The Post, adding he’s not someone you want to be on the wrong side of: “There are the two faces of Elon, or maybe it’s the moods of Elon. The good Elon and the bad Elon. I think he’s fundamentally a good person, but he definitely has some bad moods.”
In the lawsuit, Musk demands the company return as much as $150 billion in “ill-gotten” gains to OpenAI’s nonprofit arm, fire CEO Altman and president Brockman and unwind their for-profit restructuring.
He has said any damages he is awarded will go to charity. Neither he nor Altman responded to The Post’s requests for comment.
OpenAI has called Musk’s lawsuit “baseless,” a “sham” and a “harassment campaign.”
In January, the company sent a letter to investors warning that it expected Musk to make “deliberately outlandish, attention-grabbing claims” ahead of the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also claims fraud, saying Musk was deceived by Altman and Brockman about making the company for-profit and that they and other investors have enriched themselves at the expense of Musk.
Although OpenAI is valued at over $850 billion, it only has an annual revenue of around $20 billion. The company’s chatbot, ChatGPT, boasts 900 million weekly users, only 50 million of which are paid subscribers.
That doesn’t stop Altman living a billionaire lifestyle. The founder, who has one child by surrogacy with software engineer husband Oliver Mulherin, revels in the high life—owning a $27 million San Francisco mansion; a $16 million Napa Valley ranch; a 22-acre, $49 million Hawaii compound; a $250 million superyacht with a helipad and at least two hypercars, including a $20 million McLaren F1.
In contrast Musk, a father of 14, is famously unmaterialistic and socially awkward.
He recently sold off all his property, believing possessions “weigh you down,” and has been known to sleep on office floors and borrowed sofas.
“The only reason he cares about money is to the extent that it allows him to do the things he wants to do. He’ll spend money for privacy or comfort, but you’ll never hear him bragging about a $100 million Hawaii compound, or whatever,” the ex-associate of Musk said.
“Everything he does is geared toward going to Mars,” with Space X.
At that company Musk sat in a cubicle rather than a fancy corner office and rolled up to work each morning in a red Tesla Model 3 — not even his car company’s spiffiest model, recalled AI researcher and former SpaceX employee Vincent Peters to The Post.
“Unlike most tech entrepreneurs, Elon’s not going to give you a fireside chat about work that someone else at the company has done,” said Peters.
“He’s been around forever and no one has accused him of being untrustworthy.”
Others describe Musk as “unpredictable” and “audacious,” and, as Altman himself put it at one point last year “Elon busts up with everybody. That’s what he does.”
When the billionaire technocrats duke it out in the courts their lawyers will paint them each in a flattering light and praise their innovation and intellect. But not everyone feels that by being rich, it means they’re as cerebral as they’re made out to be.
“I don’t want to ascribe a degree of ten-dimensional chess to these people that might not be there. You see them on social media just reacting to stuff. To what degree are they actually gaming this out a few moves in the future? And to what degree are they really just reacting like a toddler?” questioned Aaronson.
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