OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman praised Tesla‘s new Roadster on Friday, a year after he publicly asked for his 2018 deposit back, and Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk answered a question about Altman’s order with a single word: “Indeed.”
“Wow the new roadster looks quite amazing, good job @elonmusk,” Altman wrote on X, hours after Tesla unveiled the car.
Seventeen minutes later, X user ALX (@alx) replied to Altman: “Did you cancel your order cancellation?” Musk answered by writing, “Indeed.”
OpenAI’s chief has not replied to any of those X posts, as of press time.
Altman posted as Tesla shares were giving up an early gain of more than 5% to close 2.1% lower on Friday, and Musk’s reply came after the close.
Hours later, Musk posted that the car could reach about 400 mph and perform its stunts on its own.
A Year-Old Refund Dispute
The question pointed to an episode from a year ago.
In October 2025, Altman published what he called “A tale in three acts”, showing his July 2018 Roadster reservation, a $45,000 deposit, and a refund request to Tesla that bounced back as undeliverable.
Tesla has asked Roadster buyers for $5,000 upfront and a further $45,000 within 10 days, which would explain why Altman’s refund email asked for “$50k” while the receipt he posted showed $45,000.
“I really was excited for the car! And I understand delays. But 7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait,” he wrote.
Musk replied “You stole a non-profit,” then added that Altman had “forgot to mention act 4, where this issue was fixed and you received a refund within 24 hours. But that is in your nature.”
Altman answered on November 2, 2025 by going back to Tesla: “you also wanted tesla to take openai over, no nonprofit at all. and you said we had a 0% of success. now you have a great AI company and so do we. can’t we all just move on?”
Friday’s praise was not Altman’s first for the carmaker.
“It’s gross seeing so many root against Tesla. Be the person on the side of the climate and innovation, not the person hoping to make money on puts,” he wrote in May 2019, adding that “betting against Elon is historically a mistake.”
The Tesla Option
The exchange is the latest chapter in a rivalry in which Tesla has featured from the start.
Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, and by late 2017 its leaders were debating how to fund the computing power they needed, according to emails later made public by both sides in Musk’s lawsuit.
“In the event we decide to buy Cerebras, my strong sense is that it’ll be done through Tesla,” co-founder Ilya Sutskever wrote to Musk, Altman and Greg Brockman on September 20, 2017, warning that “Tesla has a duty to shareholders to maximize shareholder return, which is not aligned with OpenAI’s mission.”
On January 31, 2018, Musk wrote that “the only paths I can think of are a major expansion of OpenAI and a major expansion of Tesla AI.”
Later that day, Andrej Karpathy, who had left OpenAI in 2017 to become Tesla’s Director of AI, sent Musk a memo arguing that “the most promising option” would be “for OpenAI to attach to Tesla as its cash cow.”
Karpathy wrote that Tesla had built the “first stage” of a rocket with the Model 3’s supply chain, onboard computer and internet connection, and that full self-driving would be the “second stage.”
Musk forwarded the memo to Sutskever and Brockman on February 1, 2018.
“Andrej is exactly right. We may wish it otherwise, but, in my and Andrej’s opinion, Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google,” he wrote.
OpenAI later said that Musk told its leaders in January 2018 that the lab was “on a path for certain failure unless we merged into Tesla,” and that he planned “to build an AGI competitor within Tesla” when he left.
OpenAI announced Musk’s departure from its board on February 20, 2018, saying: “As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon.”
Tesla on the Witness Stand
The Tesla proposal resurfaced when Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman and Brockman went to trial in Oakland, California, on April 27.
Asked by his own lawyer, Steven Molo, whether Tesla had “any concrete plans to pursue AGI,” Musk testified on April 30: “No.”
“Tesla’s AI is meant for self-driving cars. As opposed to, you know, it’s not a giant AI model that can answer any question,” he said.
A day earlier, under questioning from OpenAI’s lawyer, Musk said Tesla did not compete directly with OpenAI and that Karpathy had already been planning to leave the lab when Tesla hired him, CNBC reported.
OpenAI’s lawyer, William Savitt, showed jurors a 2017 email in which Musk told a Tesla vice president, after hiring Karpathy: “The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me. But it had to be done.”
Brockman testified that Musk later came to him with “an apology and a confession” about the hire, and that Musk had enlisted OpenAI employees to do months of free work for Tesla’s Autopilot team in 2017.
He told the court Musk once tore a painting of a Tesla Model 3 off the wall as he stormed out of a meeting where he rejected a proposal from the co-founders, and that Musk had cited SolarCity, which Tesla bought in 2016, as a case where “his cousins didn’t have control” and “he had to bail them out.”
Brockman also testified that Musk had offered him a free Tesla, which he saw as an attempt to influence him but accepted.
Shivon Zilis, who worked at OpenAI, Tesla and Neuralink, testified on May 6 that putting Altman on Tesla’s board was at one point “on the table,” Bloomberg reported.
A November 2017 draft FAQ she prepared for a Tesla event said “Tesla is building a world leading AI lab(?) which will rival the likes of Google / DeepMind and Facebook AI Research,” and described a role for Altman as “a forcing function for Sam to commit to TeslaAI.”
In February 2018, as it became clear OpenAI would not join Tesla, Musk texted Zilis: “Close and friendly but we are going to actively try to move three or four people from OpenAI to Tesla.”
Savitt also challenged Musk on gaps between his testimony and his posts on X, including on whether Tesla was working on artificial general intelligence, CNN reported.
Musk wrote on X in January 2024, about six weeks before he first sued OpenAI: “I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control.”
Altman testified on May 12 that Musk wanted complete control of OpenAI and pushed for it to become part of Tesla, according to The New York Times.
An advisory jury found on May 18 that Musk’s trial claims were barred by the statute of limitations, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers adopted the verdict on May 20.
“I will be filing an appeal with the Ninth Circuit,” Musk wrote on the day of the verdict, calling it “a calendar technicality.”
The public court docket showed no notice of appeal as of its latest entry, on September 29, with antitrust claims still pending, a mediator appointed on July 1 and Musk’s answer to OpenAI’s counterclaims filed on August 10.
Tesla’s Money in the Rivalry
The feud has also reached Tesla’s balance sheet and share price.
Tesla shares rose more than 6% to $356 on February 13, 2025, in early trading after Musk’s lawyers said a $97.4 billion bid by an investor group he led for OpenAI would be withdrawn if the lab stayed a nonprofit.
Altman had dismissed the offer on X: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
Oppenheimer analyst Colin Rusch called the bid a “distraction from Tesla’s challenges.”
Tesla shareholders then weighed in on xAI, the AI company Musk founded in 2023 as a rival to OpenAI.
At the November 2025 annual meeting, a shareholder proposal to authorize an investment in xAI drew 1,058,999,435 votes for and 916,321,296 against, but 473,073,200 abstentions meant it failed under Tesla’s bylaws, according to a regulatory filing.
Tesla agreed on January 16, 2026 to invest about $2 billion in xAI’s Series E round, it said in its fourth-quarter update.
SpaceX absorbed xAI the following month, turning Tesla’s holding into SpaceX equity, on which Tesla booked an unrealized gain of $1.01 billion in the second quarter.
xAI’s Grok assistant also runs in Tesla vehicles, and Tesla has expanded its controls in software updates this year.
Musk has declined to rule out merging Tesla with SpaceX, which now owns xAI.
Karpathy, whose 2018 memo cast Tesla as OpenAI’s financial engine, left Tesla in 2022, returned to OpenAI in 2023, left again in 2024 and joined Anthropic in May.
