'Elon Musk doesn’t have greatest respect for chess': Magnus Carlsen reveals, speaks on playing with Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg

Magnus Carlsen, the brightest mind in the chess world, recently shared his experiences of playing with or against some of the sharpest minds in the AI and tech world, as he also revealed that the Tesla and Grok owner Elon Musk doesn’t “have the greatest respect” for chess.

Carlsen’s revelations came during his commentary for the AI chess exhibition tournament on Google’s Kaggle Game Arena. During the exhibition tournament, Musk’s AI model Grok 4 was beaten 4-0 by Sam Altman's OpenAI’s o3.

Carlsen speaks on Musk not liking chess

During the commentary, Carlsen explained why Musk doesn’t respect chess, but also shared how simplicity is the beauty of the sport, which makes it quite entertaining.

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“Elon I’ve seen in person but I haven’t talked to him. You know he famously doesn’t have the greatest respect for chess players or the game which, to some extent, I understand because it is not a very complicated game, right?" Carlsen said.

“It is very simple in many ways but I think that’s also the beauty of the game. Like it’s obviously simple since it took computers not that long to master it, right? Compared to some other games. But chess is also rich and very difficult to play as well.

“Like it’s simple enough to play that you can get joy from playing after practice. Like not maybe immediately but after practice practicing a bit but hard enough that you can never actually get particularly good at it as a human which we’ve found out by seeing engines play,” he added.

When Carlsen played chess with Altman, Zuckerberg

The five-time world chess champion, Carlsen, revealed playing in a chess tournament with Sam Altman. “I have played in the same chess tournament as Sam Altman,” he said. “It was an alternate moves tournament in Silicon Valley. It was around the Champions Chess Tour final in 2022. And I think Anish Giri was on the team with him. Sam wasn’t very good. So Giri was very unhappy about being teamed with him. But he actually learned a lot through the experience. You could tell that he was very smart.”

Talking about his experience of playing chess with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Carlsen said, “He didn’t know much chess, but he was a little bit the same as Sam Altman. I thought he was even better. Was learning very, very quickly, he was forming his own opinions very quickly, which I thought was impressive. It’s a useful skill. They were not necessarily right, which you wouldn’t expect, but they were always well-reasoned.”