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

As Elon Musk tells the story, his friendship with Google co-founder Larry Page soured in June 2015. Tesla’s And SpaceX CEO’s 44th birthday party. There, Page reportedly He called Musk a “speciesist” for saying he favored humans over future digital life forms.

This happened while 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 richest people in the world. Musk’s net worth has surpassed $1 trillion, and Page is far behind at just under $300 billion. Google’s other co-founder, Sergey Brin, ranks third.

The rift may never be repaired, but Musk’s companies are more tightly intertwined with Google than ever before. Thanks to Google’s $900 million investment in SpaceX in 2015, the year of its famous birthday party, the search giant now owns about 4.9% of Musk’s reusable rocket maker, which is trying to become a major player in the artificial intelligence field.

Just before its IPO, SpaceX announced that it would lease its artificial intelligence infrastructure to Google for $920 million per month for 32 months. The deal could bring $30 billion in revenue to SpaceX’s struggling AI business and was praised by SpaceX bulls heading into the IPO.

In the 11 years since the relationship between Musk and Page frayed, their worlds have collided countless times and their businesses have partnered and competed with each other. Here are five developments in the last decade that have strengthened the bond between them, for better or worse:

Musk launches OpenAI to take over Google DeepMind

Musk founded OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman, who runs startup incubator Y Combinator. Musk had a clear goal of creating a “counterweight” to Google DeepMind, a dominant AI research laboratory.

Same year Google Invested 900 million dollars At SpaceX.

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

Musk also took aim at Google more directly by recruiting artificial intelligence researcher Ilya Sutskever from DeepMind to OpenAI.

Sustkever is the co-founder of OpenAI and was recognized for the research breakthroughs that led to the development of the company’s blockbuster AI models and its flagship product, ChatGPT. He then left to found Safe Superintelligence, which became a Google Cloud customer in 2025.

Musk continues Google’s leadership in driverless cars

Google founded its autonomous vehicle division, known as Waymo, in 2009. At the time, Tesla was taking orders for the Model S, an all-electric sedan that it had not yet started producing.

Fast forward to October 2020, when Musk accelerated his autonomous driving promises at Tesla. He began attacking Waymo in posts on Twitter and suggested that Tesla was working on a more powerful system.

Since then, Musk has repeatedly criticized Waymo for its reliance on lidar sensors, which robotaxis use to navigate and avoid obstacles. Tesla’s autonomous systems currently under development rely primarily on cheaper cameras.

Waymo currently operates a fleet of thousands of robotaxis in the US, providing more than 500,000 paid rides each week across 11 cities. According to public records, Tesla has only about 50 Robotaxi-branded vehicles operating mostly in Austin, Texas.

Although Tesla’s driver assistance systems have become more sophisticated over time, the company does not yet sell “FSD (Unsupervised)” systems, which it says will one day enable its vehicles to be driven safely without a human supervisor at the steering wheel, ready to steer or brake when necessary.

SpaceX became a key customer of Google Cloud

In 2021, Google works hard to take cloud infrastructure market share from larger rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft The company Azure has made a big profit by signing a deal with SpaceX to help it run its Starlink satellite internet service.

At that time, SpaceX had approximately 1,500 Starlink satellites in orbit and approximately 500,000 subscribers.

According to sources who spoke to CNBC at the time, the company would use Google’s private fiber optic network to quickly connect to cloud services under an agreement that would last approximately 7 years.

“The power of combining the cloud with universal secure connectivity is a very powerful combination,” Bikash Koley, then head of global networking at Google and now overseeing global infrastructure, said in the announcement.

Alleged affair

Not all the Google-related drama was about Page.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk had an affair with Brin’s ex-wife Nicole Shanahan in December 2021. reported It took place during Art Basel in Miami in 2022.

The report stated that Brin filed for divorce shortly after learning of the alleged affair.

After the news broke, Musk denied allegations that he had any romantic relationship with Shanahan. He also disputed the dispute with Brin by posting a selfie he took at a party in San Francisco, where Brin was seen laughing with attendees near Musk.

Walter Isaacson wrote in his authorized biography of Musk that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO “put himself in a position where he could take a selfie with Brin, which Brin was trying to avoid.”

in 2023 People Magazine In the interview, Shanahan denied the affair but said the allegations were “debilitating” for him. Soon after, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He linked up with and became his running mate in his unsuccessful 2024 presidential campaign. Kennedy currently serves as President Donald Trump’s health secretary.

Role reversal in the cloud

Earlier this month, SpaceX became Google’s cloud provider.

SpaceX announced a deal to lease its AI computing capacity to Google for $920 million per month for approximately 32 months. A Google Cloud spokesperson told CNBC that the deal was made “to ensure we have the bridge capacity to meet growing customer demand for our agency platform, Gemini Enterprise, which is higher than we expected.”

If SpaceX doesn’t deliver the required amount of AI chips by Sept. 30, Google could terminate the deal “after a one-month grace period,” SpaceX said in its filings. After this year, the agreement can be terminated by either party with 90 days’ notice.

For some investors, the deal strengthened SpaceX’s AI story and showed that the company could generate returns on earlier capital expenditures required to build Colossus data centers in and around Memphis, Tennessee.

The announcement comes just ahead of SpaceX’s IPO.

Alphabet’s 4.9 percent stake in SpaceX was worth more than $100 billion as of Friday’s close, making it Google’s most lucrative private market bet.

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