Elon Musk picked a fight with Chess.com, it didn't go well

Elon Musk is chasing a checkmate in his newest online spat, and this time his opponent is a chess website's social media account. It started Thursday when Musk declared that the number of non-"utterly stupid" chess moves is small and predicted the game "will be fully solved one day. "Chess.com wasn't having it.

The site's official account reposted Musk's comment with a two-word reply: "skill issue". Musk pushed back, arguing chess is difficult for humans but trivial for computers and repeating his prediction that AI would eventually solve it completely.

"Between now and then, or even after, have fun," he added. "People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better."

In its own defence, Chess.com went one step further and made a certain claim: there are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe, and therefore solving the game is tantamount to mapping all possibilities.

Musk, on the other hand, described the site as "wrong" since the number of chess positions that can be played is some 40 orders of magnitude less than the number of atoms in the universe, and he added that a superintelligent artificial intelligence would be able to come up with ways to compress data that were "far beyond what we could possibly comprehend."

Musk closed his math rebuttal with a face-palm emoji, joking that he was "arguing with some random intern at a chess website." The account shot back immediately: "I'm a full-time employee." Musk replied with a coughing emoji and left it there.

In 2012, he shut down a chess tournament among Tesla employees, telling Business Insider at the time that "we do not have time for chess."

His AI ventures haven't fared much better against the game: xAI's Grok 4 reached the final round of a 2025 chess battle before losing to OpenAI's o3 model. Chess.com's official response to the whole ordeal doubled as a parting shot: "We understand losing a chess game can be frustrating, but losing a Twitter fight to a so-called intern must be maddening."