Being the richest man alive apparently doesn’t come with enough validation, because Elon Musk now wants credit for having outgrown chess.
Not lost at chess. Not quit chess. Outgrown it. A mind like his, we’re meant to understand, is wasted on a game with 64 squares.
Which is how he ended up in a public argument with Chess.com, a leading source of expertise and chess AI, over whether the game is interesting at all.
The fight started over a number most people find staggering
It kicked off yesterday on X, because of course it did. Musk replied to a post about the number of possible moves in chess, a figure that runs a mere 40 orders of magnitude beyond the count of atoms in the observable universe.
That wasn’t big enough to hold his attention.
“The actual number of moves that are not utterly stupid in chess is tiny,” he claimed, “and chess will be fully solved one day.”
Chess.com replied with two words
The account’s response: “skill issue.”
He took the bait immediately.
“Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers. One day, it will be fully solved like checkers,” Musk wrote, which is more or less what he’d already said. “Between now and then, or even after, have fun. People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better.”
So the rest of us, in our limited time on this planet, are permitted to enjoy games and sports without grasping that some hypothetical machine may one day flatten them. Generous.
And yet he kept going, while conceding he was choosing to spend his afternoon “arguing with some random intern.” The Chess.com account corrected him: “I’m a full-time employee.”
Then he brought in the chatbot he owns
Musk went on about how an artificial superintelligence, something nobody has demonstrated is even buildable, will “figure out ways to solve and compress that are far beyond what we could possibly comprehend.”
He then cited conversations he’d had with Grok, his personal AI chatbot, as though that settled it.
There’s a real intellectual debate buried in here. Mathematicians have genuinely worked on what “solving” chess would require, and it’s a harder question than either side of an X thread can hold. But Musk’s arguments read as contempt looking for a justification rather than curiosity looking for an answer.
This is an old grudge, not a new opinion
The game has bothered him for years. In a now infamous 2022 tweet, Musk wrote that he stopped playing chess as a kid because he “found it to be too simple to be useful in real life,” then talked up Polytopia, a mobile game, as the thinking person’s alternative.
The Chess.com spat produced a variation on the same theme. Replying to another account, Musk wrote that he “felt diminishing returns from chess in terms of transfer learning to understand reality.”
Worth filing away. The next time someone runs you off the board in 20 moves, try telling them you were only experiencing diminishing returns on transfer learning.
