Elon Musk drifted from Larry Page, but SpaceX, Google closer than ever

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.

It was the same year that Google invested $900 million in SpaceX.

In messages that would come out in court years later, Musk told Altman that if left unchallenged, Google could wield monopolistic control over one of the world’s most powerful technologies.

Musk also took more direct aim at Google, recruiting AI researcher Ilya Sutskever away from DeepMind to OpenAI.

Sustkever was credited with co-founding OpenAI and with research breakthroughs that enabled the development of the company’s blockbuster AI models and flagship product, ChatGPT. He later left to start Safe Superintelligence, which became a Google Cloud customer in 2025.

Musk follows Google’s lead in self-driving cars

Google started up its autonomous vehicle division, now known as Waymo, in 2009. At the time, Tesla was taking orders for the forthcoming Model S, a fully electric sedan that it had not yet begun…