“Sam Altman is duking it out with the greatest of all time. It’s like he’s stepping into the ring with the Muhammad Ali of the tech world,” said Evan Nierman, the founder and CEO of the global crisis-PR firm Red Banyan.

Late last month, Musk threw down the gauntlet at Altman when he filed a lawsuit against him and OpenAI in a California court, alleging the Microsoft-backed company had breached a 2015 “founding agreement” to develop artificial general intelligence to benefit humanity and not as a for-profit company.

Musk has been taking shots at Altman and OpenAI for years, but Altman and his company have remained neutral — until recently.

In a recent court filing, OpenAI slammed Musk’s lawsuit as “frivolous” and “incoherent,” arguing that Musk had acted out of jealousy for OpenAI’s success after he walked away from the company in 2018. The company also published a series of emails that appear to show Musk not only supported the startup’s shift to a for-profit model but pushed for the company to “attach to Tesla as its cash cow.”

The lawsuit has pitted two of the most powerful CEOs in tech against one another. But it may not be a fair fight, the PR experts say.

Nierman said Altman and OpenAI had “more to lose” in this fight than Musk because “they haven’t been subjected to the same controversy, critique and criticism” that Musk and his companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, and the social-media site X had endured.

Musk’s reputation has already been impacted by what Nierman called a “series of PR missteps” in recent years, but the PR expert said Musk’s “brand is so much bigger than Sam Altman’s at this point, for better or worse.”

“He’s been in lots of tough brawls, and he’s managed to always come out standing,” Nierman, who’s a coauthor of “The Cancel Culture Curse,” said of Musk.

xAI gets a boost

Nierman and other PR experts told BI that Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit put the firm that made ChatGPT — and is now worth $86 billion — in the hot seat while giving Musk’s own AI startup a boost in the process.

“Elon Musk is the best PR stuntsman I’ve ever seen,” Kyle Arteaga, the CEO of the national tech-PR company The Bulleit Group, said. “Elon doesn’t care about winning this lawsuit; all he’s doing is stealing OpenAI’s media attention and putting a sliver of doubt in developers’ heads.”

Though legal experts have said Musk’s lawsuit is likely to be dismissed, Arteaga explained that Musk, through the complaint, had positioned his own rival AI startup, xAI, high up in the market thanks to the media coverage it had received in relation to the lawsuit.

“What Elon has done is basically leapfrog all of the major players — Anthropic, Cohere, and Mistral, and Gemini, and Copilot. He’s basically trying to position himself as the No. 2 player in the space,” Arteaga said.

(Arteaga represents the founder and CEO of Impulse Space, Tom Mueller, who also cofounded SpaceX.)

Nierman said Musk’s lawsuit had also put OpenAI under a microscope.

“Just by virtue of the fact that Elon Musk is raising concerns, it’s going to have a huge disruptive impact on OpenAI,” Nierman said.

Alan Dunton, the managing director of Shift Communications, a crisis-PR firm in San Francisco, said that both Musk and Altman were handling their very public legal fight in the complete opposite way to what he’d advise his clients to do but that he believed Musk’s brand would go largely unscathed.

But he said that as for Altman, a much lesser-known figure to the general public, it was too early to say.

“If you’ve made up your mind that you’re pro-Elon, I think you’re going to be pro-Elon, no matter what he does,” Dunton said.

Musk has repeatedly and publicly railed against OpenAI and Altman over the years, panning OpenAI as a “lie” and as a “closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.”

Last week, the Tesla CEO said in a post on X in response to OpenAI that he’d drop his lawsuit if the company changed its name to “ClosedAI,” showing the seemingly petty nature of his fight.

‘If you wrestle with a pig, you’re going to end up getting muddy’

Not all experts agree that Musk has played a winning hand thus far, though. Ayelet Noff, the founder and CEO of the global tech-PR firm SlicedBrand, told BI that Musk’s outbursts had worked in Altman’s favor.

“The whole saga reflects very negatively on Musk’s persona,” Noff said. “He basically has stated that he started OpenAI together with Altman in order to benefit humanity, and I think his more recent actions have shown that he’s really more concerned about the benefit of Elon Musk.”

Noff said the more “respectful” way that Altman had handled the situation had put him “in a great light.”

In the face of Musk’s very public disses, Altman has been more diplomatic in his responses.

He told the podcaster Lex Fridman last year that he understood Musk was “really stressed” about AI safety, but he wished the billionaire would do more to acknowledge the work OpenAI had done to address concerns about the technology.

Earlier this month, Altman told the veteran tech reporter Kara Swisher that Musk was his “absolute hero” growing up.

During the interview, Swisher told Altman she thought Musk’s lawsuit was “nonsense.”

“I think he is an open wound. And we have to feel it every day,” said Swisher, who has interviewed Musk on multiple occasions. “It’s not a contract. It’s an open wound of past hurt that he made a mistake,” she added.

Nierman said that OpenAI’s release of private emails from Musk showed that Altman and his firm were ready for a showdown.

“Putting out personal email exchanges online shows a willingness to air dirty laundry in public and sends the message that they intend to not just roll over, but to fight back,” Nierman said.

“There’s a saying that if you wrestle with a pig, you’re going to end up getting muddy,” Nierman said. “And I think, in this case, you got two people who are willing combatants in this wrestling match.”

Representatives for Musk, Altman, and OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment by Business Insider.