Elon Musk and OpenAI spar over pizza as AI hiring heats up

Elon Musk and an OpenAI engineer traded posts on X over the weekend, turning free lunch into a recruitment pitch. Musk highlighted xAI's wood-fired pizza while Thibault Sottiaux, an OpenAI engineering lead, countered with praise for OpenAI's dough and campus chef.

The exchange began when Musk reposted a clip of an xAI engineer calling his role the "opportunity of a lifetime" with the line "Join @xAI." Sottiaux replied, "Or join Codex," adding, "Join the bright side, we have pizza." Musk shot back, "But how good is your wood oven pizza?" and pushed the conversation toward dough fermentation and the quality of corporate chefs.

Musk also quipped, "Our chef is so good that God looked down at the food from heaven and said you my most delicious creation," and Sottiaux answered that their chef "created a recipe now universally credited to accelerating the AGI timeline." The banter underscored a broader contest for elite AI engineers.

elon musk, openai, xai, thibault sottiaux, pizza, wood-fired, codex, agi timeline, hiring, dough fermentation