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The rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk is entering its Apprentice era. Both men have the ambition to redefine how the modern world works—and both are jockeying for President Donald Trump’s blessing to accelerate their plans.

Altman’s company, OpenAI, as well as Musk’s ventures—which include SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI—all depend to some degree on federal dollars, permits, and regulatory support. The president could influence whether OpenAI or xAI produces the next major AI breakthrough, whether Musk can succeed in sending a human to Mars, and whether Altman’s big bet on nuclear energy, and fusion reactors in particular, pans out.

Understanding the competition between these two men helps illuminate Trump’s particular style of governing—one defined by patronage and dealmaking. And the rivalry highlights the tech giants’ broader capitulation to the new administration. Executives who have sold a vision of the future defined by ultra-intelligent computer programs, interplanetary travel, and boundless clean energy have bowed to a commander in chief who has already stifled free expression, scientific research, and the mere mention of climate change in government work. Why? Simply because doing so will advance their interests. (And, in some cases, because tech leaders are true believers—ideological adherents to the MAGA worldview.)

Altman’s MAGA turn is best understood as a search for a lifeline. In 2017, as Trump’s first term was just beginning, Altman tweeted, “I think Trump is terrible and few things would make me happier than him not being president.” This time around: “I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” In the months before the election, Altman and OpenAI leaned on connections to Trump allies to curry favor, according to The New York Times. In June, two of the start-up’s executives met with Trump in Las Vegas, showcasing their technology and emphasizing its land and energy needs. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s technological lead over xAI, Google, Anthropic, and other firms has dwindled.

The company’s relationship with its main financial backer, Microsoft, has also frayed so much that OpenAI is actively courting other corporate partners. (Microsoft, despite approving OpenAI’s ability to find other data-center partners, maintains that it will remain a key partner going forward.) Over the past year, a number of senior researchers have departed, and the start-up faces several lawsuits and investigations. A new and friendly administration, then, could provide Altman with a much-needed boost to maintain his firm’s shrinking edge in the AI race. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

And Musk, for all his criticism of federal bloat, is plenty dependent on the government. Over the past decade, his companies have been awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts. SpaceX relies heavily on NASA for its rocket business and as of Monday is reportedly testing its Starlink technology to improve the Federal Aviation Administration’s national airspace system, despite an existing $2 billion contract that the FAA has with Verizon. Tesla, with shrinking sales and a relatively stagnant lineup of models, could benefit mightily from friendly regulation of self-driving cars. Musk also appears jealous of Altman’s it-boy reputation in Silicon Valley and beyond: He started xAI within months of ChatGPT’s launch, has taken to calling his rival “Scam Altman,” and recently led an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI (which the start-up’s board refused). “Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity,” Altman told Bloomberg Television the next day. “I feel for the guy.”

Anything that OpenAI might gain from Trump, xAI could reap as well. Altman and Musk both hope to build data centers that use a tremendous amount of electricity—each one potentially requiring as much as would be provided by a large nuclear reactor or even several, a demand equal to millions of American homes. The government can open federal lands to data-center and power-plant construction, and it can expedite the construction of natural-gas or nuclear plants (or the now-less-likely renewable-energy sources). Trump could attempt to cut down the sometimes interminable permitting process for the transmission lines that carry that electricity to data centers. He might intervene in or make it difficult to enforce the outcomes of AI copyright litigation, and generally make the regulatory environment as friendly as possible for the industry and its investors.

[Read: For now, there’s only one good way to power AI]

Musk, of course, has cemented his place in the president’s inner circle, acting as a Trump surrogate during the campaign and now leading his efforts to remake the civil service. He has fused his political ideology—reactionary, authoritarian, nativist—with Trump’s. But Altman, too, has quietly gained the president’s confidence, albeit with a much narrower appeal to American-AI dominance. His company has ramped up its public messaging and lobbying about the importance of America’s AI leadership over China—a goal that Trump has repeatedly emphasized as a priority.

The maneuvering is already starting to pay off. The day after the inauguration, Altman stood beside Trump in the White House as the president announced Stargate, a new company planning to spend $500 billion on AI infrastructure, and in which OpenAI is a principal investor. According to the Times, Altman had struggled to raise money for Stargate for months—potential investors worried that government approval for the necessary, extensive construction would be too slow—until Trump’s victory, when sentiment flipped. During the press conference, Trump said the government’s job would be “to make it as easy as it can be” to build. Altman was sure to signal gratitude, saying that “with a different president, [Stargate] might not have been possible.”

Within hours of the announcement, Musk, not to be excluded or outdone, chimed in on X. “They don’t actually have the money,” he wrote, suggesting that Stargate’s main investors could not fund the project. Altman denied this, writing on X, “I realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put [America] first.”

[Read: OpenAI goes MAGA]

For Musk to break ranks with his newfound presidential ally suggests that the world’s richest man is still focused on an old grudge and affront to his ego. After being one of OpenAI’s initial investors, Musk left its board in 2018, at the time citing potential conflicts of interest with future AI projects at Tesla. Four years later, when OpenAI released ChatGPT and kicked off the generative-AI boom, Musk was caught off guard—not just behind in the race, but not even an entrant. Within weeks, he was suggesting that the chatbot was too “woke.” Soon after, Musk formed his own AI start-up, xAI, and last year, he sued OpenAI for betraying its original nonprofit mission. In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI released old emails from Musk suggesting he had departed because he thought that without merging with Tesla or otherwise securing substantially more funding, OpenAI’s chance of “being relevant” was “0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.” (Oops.)

Ever since he left, Musk has been playing catch-up. The first and second iterations of xAI’s model, Grok, lagged behind the most powerful versions of ChatGPT. Musk’s latest, Grok 3, appears to be in the same ballpark as OpenAI’s new, state-of-the-art “reasoning” models—but xAI accomplished this months later and likely with far more computing resources. Despite, or perhaps because of, repeatedly coming up short, Musk has evinced a willingness to use any tactic to maintain his own relevance, or at least slow down his competitors. In late March 2023, Musk signed a widely circulated letter calling for at least six months’ pause on training AI models more powerful than OpenAI’s then-just-released GPT-4—even though he had incorporated xAI weeks earlier and was actively recruiting staff. Musk’s lawsuit denounces OpenAI as profit-hungry and secretive, and he has dubbed the start-up “ClosedAI,” but the code and training data underlying Grok 3 are as opaque as that of ChatGPT. And despite Musk’s claims that Grok 3 is the “smartest AI on Earth,” OpenAI researchers have accused his start-up of misrepresenting the chatbot’s performance to make it appear on par with their own top model, o3-mini (a sort of manipulation common in the generative-AI industry, and one that OpenAI itself has been accused of as well). Still, he is now closer than ever to catching Altman, and his position at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency and his perch on Trump’s shoulder could push him over the edge.

The president, for now, seems content to keep both relationships open; certainly, his association with two tech executives considered visionaries has its perks. Altman, with his tunnel vision on AI, seems unlikely to affect or sour Trump and Musk’s ideological bond and attempt to reshape the federal government. Perhaps the greater risk to xAI is that Musk overstays his MAGA welcome and attracts the president’s ire. And Musk does not appear to have turned Trump against OpenAI. When asked about Musk’s criticism of Stargate, the president shrugged it off: “He hates one of the people,” Trump told reporters. “But I have certain hatreds of people, too.”

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