Tesla CEO Elon Musk hit back at Sam Altman’s recent comments about productivity tools, saying maker ChatGPT will “compete directly” with Satya Nadella-led Microsoft.
Sam Altman said, “Something new needs to be built to replace much of the current kind of office productivity suite.” He specifically named Google Docs, Slides, email and Slack, which he believes may be irrelevant with the new technology.
Elon Musk, a long-time critic of Microsoft’s close relationship with OpenAI, responded to X: “As I said, OpenAI will compete directly with Microsoft.
In another post on X, a user shared a video of Sam Altman along with Elon Musk’s response, and an old tweet from the Tesla founder resurfaced that read: “OpenAI will eat Microsoft alive.” The user captioned the post as “As Elon Musk predicted long ago…”
Noting the post, Musk commented, “At this point, it’s insanely suicidal for Microsoft to continue supporting OpenAI.”
Microsoft’s connection with OpenAI
Microsoft began supporting OpenAI in 2019. By the end of September 2025, the company had already invested $11.6 billion in OpenAI, according to the filing. Currently, Microsoft’s stake in the public benefit company is valued at $135 billion, or roughly 27% of the company on a recalculated basis, according to OpenAI’s official website.
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 from each other’s growth across multiple dimensions”.
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Although Microsoft and OpenAI have been partners for more than half a decade, the companies are increasingly competing in different 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 relied heavily on OpenAI models to support AI features in its key products. However, in August, Microsoft announced that it had begun publicly testing a home AI model that could lead to improvements to its Copilot assistant for consumers, CNBC reported.
Sam Altman’s thoughts on productivity tools
In a recent video that has since gone viral, Sam Altman said he believes developers can build a new kind of AI-powered productivity platform where trusted agents handle all the work and only escalate when needed.
In a recent X post, Sam Altman hinted that the company plans to build another business venture, putting itself in direct competition with cloud tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
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In a post, Sam Altman wrote: “We’re also looking at ways to directly sell computing capacity to other companies (and people); we’re pretty sure the world is going to need a lot of ‘AI cloud’ and we’re excited to offer it.”
This means that OpenAI may soon start selling its cloud services to other individuals and companies, directly competing with established players in the domain such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
