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Sam Altman and other OpenAI leaders responded this week with a tone of deep regret to Elon Musk's lawsuit. “We are saddened that it came to this with someone we greatly admired, someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor and then sued us,” they wrote.
Oh, I guess they're not fans of the Tesla and SpaceX co-founder anymore. The resentment is mutual, given that Musk last week accused Altman's staff of “blatant betrayal” and “sabotaging OpenAI's mission.” This technical friendly relationship has turned into a very bad relationship.
Elon Musk is always ready for controversy. Just last year, he challenged Meta's Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight, attacking reluctant X advertisers with obscenities. He gradually prepared for this before going public. “I'm just an idiot offering free funding to a startup,” he complained in a 2017 email to OpenAI, threatening to withdraw his financial support.
There spoke the true businessman, prone to self-pity. Founders are often “preoccupied with the threat of submission to some outside control or infringement of their will. . . “They live in fear of becoming a victim,” the psychoanalyst and management academic Manfred Kets de Vries once wrote.
The positive aspects of entrepreneurs — their energy, self-confidence, drive for achievement, and willingness to fight against seemingly insurmountable odds — can come with a dark side. Many of them are also narcissistic and aggressive when threatened: they are, in the words of Kets de Vries, “misfits who need to create their own environment.”
Musk fits the bill both ways, joining a long tradition of entrepreneurs who have been creative disruptors of the status quo and dedicated fighters. Thomas Edison found time between inventions to wage a “War of Currents” with George Westinghouse in the late 19th century, publicly criticizing his rival and accusing him of endangering people's lives with alternating current technology.
Many fights break out within families. They include the legal battles over Hancock's exploration company in Australia between Gina Rinehart and several children, and the previous tussle between Anil and Mukesh Ambani over Reliance Industries. Mukesh emerged as the richest man in India and this week held a celebration full of celebrities before the wedding of his son Anant in Gujarat.
These confrontations can sometimes lead to fruitful results. Adi and Rudi Dassler, the brothers who founded Adidas and Puma, divided the Bavarian city of Herzogenaurach over their long-standing rivalry, and were finally buried at opposite ends of its cemetery. It was bad for family relations, but their determination to outdo each other produced two of the best sportswear brands in the world.
Entrepreneurs are often motivated by stress: resentment at being slighted or ignored provides fuel for the arduous journey of showing others that they have underestimated them. Lamborghini might have still been stuck producing agricultural machinery had Enzo Ferrari not been teasing Ferruccio Lamborghini about not knowing enough to make sports cars.
Steve Jobs was also free from insults directed at Bill Gates during their rivalry over personal computing. “Bill is fundamentally unimaginative and has never invented anything,” Apple co-founder Walter Isaacson told biographer Walter Isaacson of his Microsoft counterpart. The dispute turned into an age-old question between close rivals: Who stole ideas from the other?
But it was not a zero-sum game. Apple and Microsoft are now the world's most valuable companies, and Gates was among the guests at an Ambanis event this week. He ended up being lukewarm: “We motivated each other, even as competitors,” he once said after Job's death. This is the truth, although it is usually acknowledged after the heat of battle.
It would be nice to think that such leaders are distracted by arguments and would achieve more if they remained focused on business. But productivity and aggression are closely linked to each other. The qualities that make entrepreneurs successful can also make them insufferable, as well as mentally torture them.
Musk continues to fight: his attack on Altman and OpenAI came after a dispute with Larry Page, co-founder of Google and its parent company Alphabet. “Larry shouldn't control the future of AI,” he declared in 2013 when they argued about the future of AI. Musk began funding OpenAI after Alphabet acquired DeepMind, after it tried to block the deal.
Whatever his concerns about AI getting out of control at a for-profit organization, his animus against Page helped OpenAI overtake Google and be worth billions. He doesn't like how it partnered with Microsoft instead of staying within its orbit, but he helped create it. If he had been less feisty, ChatGPT might not have existed.
If Musk was awkward, immature and rude, so were others whose brands were still there. It may be surprising to learn about the shortcomings of many entrepreneurs, but that is no coincidence. Hostility was in their nature, as it certainly was with the other side.
john.gapper@ft.com
