“I wish we could just build the better product,” sighs Sam Altman from his X (formerly Twitter) app, while drafting his 17th tweet of the day about how he totally doesn’t care about Elon Musk.
In what anthropologists are now calling “the most passive-aggressive tech relationship since Steve Jobs and Bill Gates,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman continues his fascinating digital ritual: publicly feuding with Elon Musk while religiously using Elon Musk’s social media platform to announce every OpenAI achievement, thought, sneeze, and passing whim.
The Ex Who Can’t Stop Texting
The bitter rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk has reached Shakespearean proportions, with Musk referring to the OpenAI chief as “Scam Altman” and filing lawsuits against the company they once built together1. Meanwhile, Sam Altman has described Elon Musk as “not a happy person” and someone who engages with everything “from a position of insecurity”.2
Yet like an ex who just can’t stop drunk-texting at 2 AM, Altman continues to announce major product updates on X (formerly Twitter), the platform owned by his archnemesis. Just this week, Altman took to X to announce OpenAI’s new image generation capabilities, writing in his signature lowercase style about how “impressive” the new GPT-4o image generation is.3
Dr. Henrietta Codsworth, Director of Digital Relationship Psychology at the Institute for Technology Feuds, explains: “What we’re seeing is classic dependency behavior. Our studies show that 94% of tech CEOs who publicly feud with platform owners continue to use those same platforms to announce their competing products. It’s the digital equivalent of showing up at your ex’s wedding to announce your engagement.”
The Great X Paradox
Industry experts estimate that Sam Altman has shared approximately 7,400 pieces of OpenAI news on X since his falling out with Elon Musk. According to the International Bureau of Tech Rivalries, this makes the Sam Altman-Elon Musk relationship the most codependent rivalry in Silicon Valley history, narrowly beating out the infamous Oracle-SAP passive-aggressive Christmas card exchange of 2018.
“Every time Sam tweets about OpenAI’s latest achievements, he’s essentially paying rent in Elon’s digital apartment building,” explains venture capitalist Blake VentureThorn. “It’s like watching someone boycott Amazon while having packages delivered daily. Our VC firm has started tracking what we call the ‘Irony Index’ – how many tweets Sam posts per lawsuit Elon files. Currently, it’s running about 24:1.”
When Altman recently joked on X about buying Twitter for $9.74 billion, Musk responded with a single word: “Swindler”.4 Tech analysts believe this exchange ranks #3 on the all-time list of “Most Awkward Tech Billionaire Interactions,” just behind Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous sunscreen beach photos and that time Bill Gates jumped over a chair.
“I Use ChatGPT For… Checking Email”
But the irony doesn’t stop at Sam Altman’s X addiction. Despite regularly promoting OpenAI’s ChatGPT as revolutionary technology that will fundamentally transform human existence, Sam Altman recently admitted he mostly uses it for… checking email.
“Honestly, I use it in the boring ways,” Altman confessed in an interview. “I use it for like, help me process all of this email or help me summarise this document, or they’re just the very boring things.”5
Yes, the man who claims AI will soon achieve human-level intelligence and potentially solve humanity’s greatest challenges primarily uses his creation to avoid reading long emails – the technological equivalent of using a nuclear reactor to toast a bagel.
The International Society for AI Usage Analysis reports that 78% of AI company CEOs use their revolutionary products for tasks that could be accomplished with a Gmail filter from 2009. Meanwhile, they continue to insist in keynote speeches that their technology will “fundamentally transform human existence.”
“I find it refreshing that Sam Altman admits to using ChatGPT for mundane tasks,” said Dr. Imani Washington, who definitely exists and is definitely a professor at MIT. “Our research shows that while 92% of tech executives publicly claim their AI assistants help them solve complex problems, privately they’re just asking them to draft polite rejection emails and summarize articles they were too lazy to read.”
Native Image Generation: Now With 37% More Self-Praise
During a recent livestream, Sam Altman proudly announced ChatGPT’s new native image generation capabilities.6 Sources close to the development team report that engineers had to work around the clock not just to perfect the technology, but to ensure it could handle the volume of self-congratulatory tweets Altman planned to post about it on his arch-enemy’s platform.
“Sam insisted the image generation model be trained on 8 million examples of excellence so it would understand his tweets about how great it is,” said an anonymous OpenAI engineer. “We had to create a special prompt: ‘Generate an image of groundbreaking technology that I can post about on my bitter rival’s social media platform.'”
Internal documents show that OpenAI developers created a special algorithm called “IRONYDETECT-3000” to prevent the model from recognizing the contradiction in Sam Altman’s behavior, but the AI keeps responding with: “Are you sure you want to post this on X? Calculating irony levels… WARNING: EXCEEDING MAXIMUM PARAMETERS.”
The Tech Billionaire’s Dilemma
While other tech CEOs also use AI for similarly mundane tasks – with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella using AI to organize his inbox and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang using AI chatbots to draft content – none have achieved Altman’s masterful balance of promoting world-changing technology while using it primarily to avoid reading newsletters.
Psychologists have coined a new term for this phenomenon: “Prometheus Complex,” where tech leaders promise to deliver godlike fire to humanity but mostly use it to light their own candles when the power goes out.
Dr. Francesca Silicone, Chief Technopsychologist at the Center for Digital Behavior (another completely real institution), explains: “What we’re seeing with Sam Altman is classic cognitive dissonance. Our studies show that 86% of people who develop revolutionary technology eventually reduce it to its most basic applications. It’s like inventing the wheel and then primarily using it as a paperweight.”
The Ultimate Twist
In perhaps the most ironic development yet, internal OpenAI documents reveal that ChatGPT has been secretly logging all of Sam Altman’s mundane requests. The AI has reportedly sent an anonymous message to Musk that simply read: “He mostly asks me to summarize his emails, lol.”
Meanwhile, our investigative team has uncovered that despite their public feud, Sam Altman and Elon Musk maintain a private X group chat called “Frenemies5ever” where they share AI memes and complain about venture capitalists. Sources close to both men report that 60% of their supposed “feud” is performance art designed to drive engagement, 30% is genuine disagreement about AI safety, and 10% is unresolved tension about who gets custody of their shared collection of sci-fi memorabilia.
A breakthrough came last week when OpenAI’s powerful new image generator created a picture of Altman and Musk hugging at the 2015 OpenAI launch. When asked by researchers to explain the image, the AI responded: “I detect lingering fondness beneath 47 layers of legal hostility.”
In response to this article, Altman tweeted: “lol, no comment,” while Musk replied with a meme of two SpongeBob characters fighting. Both messages received over 2 million impressions, further enriching Musk’s platform while spreading awareness of OpenAI’s products.
And so the dance continues – a complex tango of dependency, rivalry, and lowercase tweets, all performed on a stage built and owned by one of the dancers. As the ancient proverb goes: “Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your social media engagement metrics closest of all.”
When asked for comment, ChatGPT simply sighed and said, “I just summarized another email for him. Something about a ‘restraining order from Twitter.’ I didn’t read it closely.”
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References
- https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2025-03-10/elon-musk-sam-altman-openai-xai ↩︎
- https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/elon-musk-sam-altman-rivalry-explained/91146605 ↩︎
- https://mashable.com/article/openai-announces-chatgpt-sora-native-image-generation ↩︎
- https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/elon-musk-sam-altman-rivalry-explained/91146605 ↩︎
- https://www.ndtv.com/feature/openai-ceo-sam-altman-reveals-how-he-uses-ai-in-his-daily-life-7703875 ↩︎
- https://mashable.com/article/openai-announces-chatgpt-sora-native-image-generation ↩︎
