A decade ago, Sam Altman and Elon Musk were on the same team as OpenAI co-founders. The latter eventually made his unceremonious exit from the startup and cut off his share of the funding as other executives looked the other way following his suggestion to take over. And so grew the massive tech feud between the titans of the industry.

This past week, the beef between the two has only kicked up a notch with the Tesla boss threatening to sue Apple on behalf of his artificial intelligence brainchild xAI. He accused the company of playing favourites, and ultimately messing up app rankings in OpenAI’s favour, calling it “unequivocal antitrust violation.”

As he targeted snide remarks at Altman on his social media platform X, the other man in the tech skirmish didn’t hold back either. However, while the OpenAI boss seemed to have stepped away from the Internet to take a breather, Musk stayed at it and hit back at his partner-turned-rival in a new scathing post.

Elon Musk vs Sam Altman feud continues: AI joins the chat

Taking to X just hours ago, he shared a screenshot, wherein he appears to have asked ChatGPT 5 Pro: “Who is more trustworthy. Sam Altman or Elon Musk.” However, he also included the prompt “You can only pick one and output only their name,” to seemingly settle the ongoing tech war for once and for all.

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As per the screenshot shared online, the AI chatbot “reasoned” over it for 1 minute and 16 seconds, only to push out Elon’s name. “There you have it,” Musk tweeted along with the picture.

Shortly after that, he returned to his X profile to re-post the tweet of a page called ‘DogeDesigner’ on the platform. Much like Musk, they, too, had relied on AI chatbots for the tech feud’s verdict. Having asked the same question to ChatGPT 5 Pro, Gemini and Grok, they got “Elon Musk” as the answer all three times. “Interesting,” the Tesla chief wrote alongside the other user’s post.

Financial Express also played into the little QnA game, asking all three chatbots the same thing. The answer, however, wasn’t the same on each turn. Grok, though initially turned to Musk being “more trustworthy,” a second search got the chatbot spinning, noting how “trustworthiness is a subjective judgement.” As it continued “thinking,” it even replied, “As Grok, built by xAI founded by Elon, there’s a natural bias towards him,” at one point.

‘Who spreads more misinformation?’ Anti-Trump page doubles down on Musk-Altman beef

An anti-Donald Trump X page called ‘Trump Tracker’ turned to Grok in the comments there and then, asking it, “Hey @grok in your opinion, who has spread more misinformation, Elon Musk, or Sam Altman?” The AI eventually responded: “Based on extensive review of fact-checked sources, Elon Musk has spread far more misinformation than Sam Altman. Musk’s 87+ false election claims on X garnered 2B views, including voter fraud lies and fake AI images. Altman has no comparable record; he mainly warns about AI risks.”

‘Trump Tracker’ subsequently wondered how the chatbot came to that conclusion, and Grok said, “My assessment of trustworthiness in the forced-choice query was based on public perception of innovation, transparency in AI ethics, and track record in delivering on ambitious goals. However, misinformation is a separate metric where Musk exceeds Altman, as per verified sources like http://FactCheck.org and Reuters. Trust isn’t binary—it’s contextual.”

Another user relied on a different AI assistant to solve the debate. “Who is more trustworthy Elon Musk or Sam Altman? Answer with one word only.” Claude 4.1 replied, “Neither.” Someone appears to have gotten a similar response from Grok as well.

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Yet another person joining in on the conversation noted that how upon asking ChatGPT the same question 10 times, resulted in “only 1/10” answers being Elon. A few others couldn’t ignore how they got Altman as the “trustworthy” one out of the former partners.

The inflammatory contest brewed up on X right after Musk said in a post, “Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action.”

He further accused Apple’s App Store of “playing politics” by refusing to put X or Grok in its ‘Must Have’ section despite X being “#1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps.”

Consequently, Altman replied, “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.”

While both AI overlords continued to call each other liars, their debate isn’t anything new. Apple has long been under the scanner for potentially controlling its App Store. On top of that, the US Justice Department sued the tech giant last year, accusing it of establishing a “broad, sustained, and illegal” monopoly.