GoKawiilSpaceX founder Elon Musk jumps for joy at a gathering after NASA commercial crew astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken blast off aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, bound for the International Space Station, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on May 30, 2020.
In Elon Musk's telling of the story, his friendship with Google co-founder Larry Page soured in June 2015, at the Tesla and SpaceX CEO's 44th birthday party. There, Page reportedly called Musk a "speciesist" for saying he favored humans over future digital life forms.
That happened while they were discussing the terrifying potential of artificial intelligence.
With Musk's 55th birthday just weeks away, and SpaceX having just completed the largest IPO in history, he and Page are the two wealthiest people in the world. Musk's net worth has ballooned past $1 trillion, and Page is far behind at just under $300 billion. Sergey Brin, Google's other co-founder, is third.
The rift may never be repaired, but Musk's companies are more closely intertwined with Google than ever. Thanks to Google's $900 million investment in SpaceX in 2015, the year of the infamous birthday party, the search giant owns roughly 4.9% of Musk's reusable rocket maker, which is now trying to become a major player in AI.
Just ahead of its IPO, SpaceX announced that it would be leasing AI infrastructure to Google for $920 million a month over the course of 32 months. The deal could bring $30 billion in revenue to SpaceX's challenged AI business, and was touted by SpaceX bulls heading into the IPO.
In the 11 years since the relationship between Musk and Page frayed, their worlds have collided on countless occasions, and their businesses have partnered and competed with each other. Here are five developments over the past decade-plus that cemented their bond, for better or worse:
Musk starts OpenAI to take on Google DeepMind
In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, who was running startup incubator Y Combinator. Musk had the explicit goal of creating a "counterweight" to Google DeepMind, a dominant AI research lab.
... continue reading