Elon Musk slams Microsoft’s support for OpenAI as ‘insanely suicidal’ after Sam Altman pushes AI over office suite
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has responded sharply to Sam Altman’s recent remarks about productivity tools, saying that the ChatGPT-maker will “compete directly” with the Satya Nadella-led Microsoft.
Sam Altman said, “There is something new to build that is gonna replace a lot of the current sort of office productivity suite.” He specifically named Google Docs, Slides, email and Slack, which he suggested may become irrelevant with new technology.
Elon Musk, a long-time critic of Microsoft’s close relationship with OpenAI, replied on X, “As I was saying, OpenAI will compete directly with Microsoft.”
In another post on X, a user shared Sam Altman’s video along with Elon Musk’s response, and resurfaced an old tweet from the Tesla founder that read, “OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive.” The user captioned the post as “As Elon Musk predicted a long time ago…”
Musk noticed this post and commented, “At this point, it’s insanely suicidal for Microsoft to continue supporting OpenAI.”
Microsoft’s ties with OpenAI
Microsoft began backing OpenAI in 2019. As of the end of September 2025, the company had already invested $11.6 billion in OpenAI, according to a filing. Currently, Microsoft’s stake in the public benefit corporation is valued at $135 billion, or roughly 27% of the company on an as-converted diluted basis, according to OpenAI’s official website.
On the company’s earnings call in October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described their relationship as “one of the most successful partnerships and investments our industry has ever seen,” adding that “we continue to benefit mutually from each other’s growth across multiple dimensions.”
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Although Microsoft and OpenAI have been partners for over half a decade, the companies are increasingly competing in various parts of the AI market. This was evident in Microsoft’s annual report last year, where the company added OpenAI to its list of competitors.
Microsoft has largely relied on OpenAI’s models to power AI features in its key products. However, in August, Microsoft announced that it had begun publicly testing a homegrown AI model, which could lead to enhancements to its Copilot assistant for consumers, CNBC reported.
Sam Altman’s views on productivity tools
In a recent video, which has since gone viral, Sam Altman said he believes developers can build a new kind of AI-powered productivity platform, where trusted agents will handle all the work and only escalate when necessary.
In a recent X post, Sam Altman hinted that the company is planning to build another business venture, putting it in direct competition with cloud technology giants, such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
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Sam Altman wrote in the post, “We are also looking at ways to more directly sell compute capacity to other companies (and people); we are pretty sure the world is going to need a lot of “AI cloud”, and we are excited to offer this.”
This means that OpenAI may soon start selling its cloud services to other individuals and companies, putting it in direct competition with established players in the domain, such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
