Elon Musk spent most of this week arguing with the social media manager of a chess website, and by general agreement he came off worse. It started on September 3, when Musk replied to a viral post explaining how fast chess branches out from the opening move. His view was that the number of moves that are not, in his words, utterly stupid is tiny, and that “chess will be fully solved one day.” Chess.com replied with two words: “skill issue.”What followed was roughly 24 hours of the world’s richest man trading posts with an anonymous account admin, calling that person an intern, being corrected on their job title, and finally reaching for a toilet metaphor to make a point about cosmology. It is also not the first round. The same website ran a piece in 2022 asking why Musk doesn’t and can’t play chess, and it ran to nearly a thousand words.
Elon Musk says chess will be solved like checkers, and AI will do it
His actual claim is not unreasonable on its own. Chess is hard for humans but not for computers, he wrote, and one day it will be fully solved the way checkers was. Checkers was weakly solved in 2007, and perfect play from both sides ends in a draw. Chess has no such proof. Engines have been beating the best humans for years, which tells us nothing about whether flawless play produces a win for White, a win for Black, or a draw.
Chess.com brought out the atoms, Musk brought out the orders of magnitude
The site’s next post said there are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe, by about 40 orders of magnitude, and that solving chess means mapping all of them. Musk called that wrong, pointing out that legal chess positions run about 40 orders of magnitude below the atom count, and that artificial superintelligence would find ways to solve and compress the problem that we cannot follow.Both numbers hold up. Chess.com was talking about games, roughly 10^120, the figure known as the Shannon number. Musk was talking about legal positions, around 4.6 x 10^44. Musk then posted a Grok answer with laughing emojis, which is where it gets slightly awkward, because that answer opened by conceding it had overstated the storage claim. He also dismissed the atom comparison by noting there are more ways to relieve yourself in a pot than atoms in the universe, calling it an idiotic metric.
The Elon Musk vs Chess.com feud actually started in 2022
In December 2022 Musk said he played as a child but found chess too simple for real life, citing the 8 by 8 grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random spawn positions. The site’s rebuttal article pointed at castling, en passant, promotion and the knight’s eight possible landing squares. Musk ignored it at the time.He did not ignore it this week. After he referred to “some random intern at a chess website,” the account answered that it was a full-time employee. Chess.com executive Daniel Rensch then replied that the admin was now, which drew a thank you to Mr Bossman. A spokesperson finished the job, noting that “losing a Twitter fight to a so-called intern must be maddening.”