Entrepreneur Battle: My Friendship With Google CEO Larry Page Ended Over Recruiting Ilya Sutskever To Open AI says Elon Musk

Running a business can take a toll on your finances and health, but it can affect relationships too — no matter how successful you might end up being.

Elon Musk has revealed that his friendship with Google founder and CEO Larry Page ended after he recruited Ilya Sutskever away from Google to join OpenAI. Ilya had been one of the biggest names in the field, and Elon Musk — who was the co-founder and biggest financial backer of OpenAI — used his influence to convince him to join OpenAI. Musk says that it was Ilya’s hiring that was crucial to making OpenAI the behemoth that it is today.

“Maybe you and Larry Page can still be friends once more,” Lex Fridman asked Musk on the Lex Fridman podcast. “I’d like to be friends with Larry again,” Musk replied. “The breaking of the friendship was over OpenAI. And specifically, I think the key moment was recruiting Ilya Sutskayer,” he said.

“Ilya is good human, smart, good heart. That was a tough recruiting battle. It was mostly (Google Deepmind’s) Demis Hassabis on one side and me on the other, both trying to recruit Ilya, and Ilya went back and forth. He was going to stay at Google, then he was going to leave, then he was going to stay, then he was going to leave, and finally he did agree to join OpenAI. That was one of the toughest recruiting battles we’ve ever had, but that was really the linchpin for OpenAI being successful,” Musk recalled.

Ilya Sutskever had been one of the biggest names in Deep Learning at that point, having worked with Geoffrey Hinton at his lab, and was one of the seminal authors of the AlexNet paper, which proved the potential of Deep Learning. He’d been working at Google, but joined OpenAI in 2015, and became its Chief Scientist. Ilya Sutskever had been thought to be instrumental in helping create OpenAI’s breakthrough product, ChatGPT, and is still regarded as one of the foremost AI researchers in the world.

And while Musk managed to pull Ilya away from Google, it was a pyrrhic victory in more ways than one. It ruined his friendship with Google founder Larry Page, and to make matters worse, his OpenAI move didn’t work out — OpenAI had been founded as a non-profit in 2015, but after a dispute with the other founders, including Sam Altman, Musk dissociated from the company. OpenAI has now become the biggest AI company in the world, and Musk is being forced to play catch up with xAI, in spite of having founded and bankrolled OpenAI when it was starting off. There’s lots written about the practical aspects of running a business, but the emotional aspects can often be as difficult to maneuver.