Apparently being the world’s wealthiest person still leaves a validation gap, because Elon Musk would now like recognition for having moved beyond chess.
He didn’t lose at it. He didn’t walk away from it. He outgrew it. Sixty-four squares, we’re supposed to accept, are simply beneath a mind of that caliber.
All of which explains how he wound up publicly sparring with Chess.com — a leading source of expertise and chess AI — about whether the game holds any interest whatsoever.
It began with a figure most people find hard to fathom
The whole thing started yesterday on X, naturally. Musk weighed in on a post about how many possible moves chess contains, a total that exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe by a mere 40 orders of magnitude.
Not impressive enough to keep him engaged.
“The actual number of moves that are not utterly stupid in chess is tiny,” he argued, “and chess will be fully solved one day.”
Chess.com answered in two words
From the account came: “skill issue.”
He bit instantly.
“Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers. One day, it will be fully solved like checkers,” Musk posted — essentially a restatement of his opening position. “Between now and then, or even after, have fun. People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better.”
Which means the rest of us have his blessing to enjoy games and sports during our brief stay here, provided we accept that some theoretical machine might eventually render them trivial. Very kind.
Still he pressed on, admitting along the way that he was devoting his afternoon to “arguing with some random intern.” The Chess.com account set the record straight: “I’m a full-time employee.”
Enter the chatbot he happens to own
Musk expanded on the theme, predicting that an artificial superintelligence — a technology nobody has shown can actually be built — will “figure out ways to solve and compress that are far beyond what we could possibly comprehend.”
He then pointed to discussions he’d had with Grok, his own AI chatbot, as if that closed the matter.
Somewhere underneath all this sits a legitimate intellectual question. Mathematicians have seriously examined what it would actually take to “solve” chess, and the problem is too big for either side of an X thread to contain. Musk’s case, though, comes across as disdain hunting for a rationale rather than curiosity hunting for an answer.
This grudge isn’t new
Chess has irritated him for years. A now infamous tweet from 2022 saw Musk explain that he gave up the game as a child because he “found it to be too simple to be useful in real life,” before promoting Polytopia, a mobile game, as the smarter person’s substitute.
The Chess.com exchange yielded another spin on that idea. Answering a different account, Musk said he had “felt diminishing returns from chess in terms of transfer learning to understand reality.”
File that one away. Next time somebody wipes you off the board in 20 moves, inform them you were merely hitting diminishing returns on transfer learning.