Elon and Sam Race Billion-Dollar Toys Like Toddlers With Trust Funds
KEY POINTS
- •OpenAI overtook SpaceX as the world’s most valuable private company in October 2025, with a $500 billion valuation.
- •Elon Musk plans a secondary sale at SpaceX to value it at $800 billion, aiming to reclaim the top spot.
- •Musk left OpenAI in 2018, founded rival startup xAI, and has since filed lawsuits against OpenAI.
In a private company showdown straight out of a billionaire soap opera, Sam Altman’s OpenAI briefly snatched the world’s most valuable private company crown in October, flashing a $500 billion price tag that outpaced Elon Musk’s SpaceX by $100 billion. Musk, the ultimate stubborn ex-colleague, announced plans to whip out another secondary share sale that values SpaceX at a mind-blowing $800 billion—essentially yanking the crown back as if this were just a fun game of corporate musical chairs. They founded OpenAI together in 2015, parted ways in theatrics by 2018, with Musk even founding rival xAI and filing lawsuits against Altman’s gang. Amidst Twitter-confirmed IPO hints and Mars-colonization dreams, their billion-dollar version of playground thumbsies exposes just how juicy the frontier tech bubble has become — with AI and rockets wildly inflating valuations while the rest of us check our bank balances for fun.
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Two billionaires fighting over private company valuations like kids with Monopoly money, while the rest of us count pennies and wonder how $800 billion can fit in a spaceship.
Elon and Sam's feud looks less like tech rivalry and more like a soap opera where billion-dollar companies are the dramatic props.
Watch billionaires play stock-market hopscotch with valuations that could fund Mars—normal folks just trying to fund dinner.
Source: Businessinsider | Published: 12/14/2025 | Author: Peter Gelling
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