Sam Altman tells Vanity Fair Elon Musk is a bully he will still work with

Sam Altman called Elon Musk a bully and said he would still work with him, in an interview with Vanity Fair. The magazine published it on 5 October with its revived New Establishment list. The OpenAI chief executive tops that list.

Vanity Fair global editorial director Mark Guiducci recorded the conversation in San Francisco on 11 September, for the Fair Game podcast. It is the first of two interviews. Vanity Fair said on air that its parent company, Condé Nast, has a content deal with OpenAI.

“I will work with Elon, of course”

Guiducci said the AI industry needs to work together, “except when you’re negging Elon on Twitter”. Altman asked which of the two had been nicer to the other. He said he would not call himself a saint.

“Look, I don’t like bullies, and I think Elon’s a bully. And so I think once in a while, you got to punch a bully back in the nose.”

He said Musk, like many bullies, only respects people who hit back. So people who want the two men to work together should be happy he does, he said.

“But I will work with Elon, of course.”

Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman. A jury ruled against Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit in May, after a trial that opened with two competing stories.

“Not nice” and “Pass”

At the end of the interview, Guiducci read out names and asked for Altman’s first words. Altman answered “Not nice” to Musk and “Pass” to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. He called President Donald Trump “Powerful” and Peter Thiel “Great”.

For OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, he said “Brilliant”, then “caring, and warm, and wonderful person”. He then went back to Musk and Amodei.

“I really want to emphasize how willing I am and how willing I think our whole company is to work with them.”

Anthropic ran Super Bowl ads mocking OpenAI in February.

The face of AI

Guiducci said many people now see AI as an evil force, and Altman as a villain. Altman said he does feel mischaracterised, but that it is “only somewhat frustrating”. He said people need someone to blame for the anxiety AI causes.

“I think if there were somebody else doing my job, people would have the same feelings and say the same things.”

He said he once felt the same way about Mark Zuckerberg. He had “a very evil caricature of him” in the early days of Meta, before he knew him.

A film about him

Andrew Garfield plays Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial. Altman said he has seen the trailer. The crew once filmed outside his house, and he walked past it on his way to get coffee. He saw a man dressed like him, with the same backpack.

“I felt I was in some weird like glitch of the simulation or something. It was very strange.”

He said he only waved at Garfield. On the film itself, he said he did not think the makers were going for accuracy, “except for the walk”. He said the trailer’s bunker with firearms on the wall does not exist. He does have a ranch where his family could live off grid, he said.

Amazon produced the film, then dropped the film in June. Neon will release it on Christmas Day. Amazon invested $50bn in OpenAI earlier this year. Asked whether he or anyone on his behalf spoke to Amazon about the film, Altman said:

“I did not, and I don’t know of anyone else who did.”

He said he never spoke to Jeff Bezos about it either.