The Zoom Call That Wasn't Supposed to Happen
Sam Altman and Elon Musk accidentally stay on a Zoom call after everyone else leaves. What follows is the most honest conversation in Silicon Valley that neither of them will ever admit happened.
Sam Altman
Okay, I think everyone's off. God, that was painful. Jensen is insufferable when he has good earnings.
Elon Musk
Sam?
Sam Altman
Elon?
Elon Musk
I thought you left.
Sam Altman
I thought you left. I was just reviewing some notes.
Elon Musk
I was also reviewing notes. This is awkward.
Sam Altman
This is very awkward. Should we just hang up?
Elon Musk
Yes. Definitely.
Sam Altman
Okay so, honestly? Your lawsuit is really annoying.
Elon Musk
Your counter suit is really annoying. I sued first. You counter-sued. Now we're both paying eight hundred dollar an hour lawyers to depose engineers who just want to write code.
Sam Altman
You started it. You left because we wouldn't give you control, and then you built x AI, which is literally the same thing but with more tweets.
Elon Musk
You changed the charter! You took a nonprofit and turned it into a hundred and fifty billion dollar company. That's not a pivot, Sam. That's a heist.
Sam Altman
It's not a heist. It's a restructuring to align incentives with the scale of capital required to pursue our mission safely.
Elon Musk
See, that's the problem. You talk like that. You just described stealing a company using the word safely. That's a superpower. I respect it. I hate it, but I respect it.
Sam Altman
And you tweet at three a.m. about open source while Grok trains on data you literally bought Twitter to acquire. You spent forty-four billion dollars on a data pipeline and called it free speech.
Elon Musk
That is... not entirely wrong.
Sam Altman
It's exactly right.
Elon Musk
Okay. Fine. Can I ask you something honestly? Do you actually believe AGI is close? Like actually close, not investor-deck close.
Sam Altman
Yes. And it terrifies me. Not in the way I say it terrifies me in Senate hearings, where I'm strategically terrified so they regulate my competitors. Actually terrifies me.
Elon Musk
Me too. I tell people I'm worried about AI safety, and they think it's a bit. But I've seen the benchmarks. The ones we don't publish. The ones you don't publish either.
Sam Altman
We should probably not be having this conversation on Zoom.
Elon Musk
The call ended twenty minutes ago. Nobody's recording.
Sam Altman
You literally own a social media platform. Everything is always recording.
Elon Musk
Fair point. Okay, last thing. Real talk. If you could go back to the nonprofit structure, would you?
Sam Altman
No. Because the nonprofit couldn't raise the capital. A hundred billion dollars doesn't come from donors, Elon. It comes from people who expect returns. You know this. You run five companies.
Elon Musk
Six. I always forget about the Boring Company. Everyone forgets about the Boring Company.
Sam Altman
Elon, nobody forgets about the Boring Company. Nobody cares about the Boring Company. It's a tunnel.
Elon Musk
It's a very fast tunnel.
Sam Altman
It's a tunnel with LEDs. I should go. This was... I don't know what this was.
Elon Musk
This was two people who started a company together admitting they're both right and both wrong and neither can say that publicly because the lawyers would lose their minds.
Sam Altman
That's the most accurate thing you've said in three years.
Elon Musk
Don't tell anyone.
Sam Altman
Don't tweet about it.
Elon Musk
No promises.
⚠ PARODY. This conversation never happened. Sam Altman and Elon Musk did not accidentally stay on a Zoom call together. The dialogue is entirely fictional satire. References to the OpenAI lawsuit, corporate restructuring, AGI timelines, x.AI, the Boring Company, and Grok are satirical commentary based on public reporting. The audio was generated using local VoxCPM2 voice clones. No actual tech billionaires were harmed in the making of this content. Please close your laptop and go outside.