Why did Larry Page call Elon Musk a speciesist? The argument Musk says created OpenAI

Speciesism: prejudice or bias in favor of the interests of one's own species over those of other species. The term comes from animal ethics.

Speciesist: a person who shows speciesism. In the argument between Page and Musk, it described someone who puts humans ahead of digital minds.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI): an AI system that can match people at most kinds of thinking work, rather than one narrow task.

Superintelligence: an AI system that is far more capable than the best human minds in almost every field.

AI alignment: the work of making sure AI systems pursue the goals their makers intend and stay under meaningful human control.

Successor species: a species that follows, and may replace, an existing one. In AI debates, it describes digital minds that could come after humans.

Successionism: the view that humanity should accept, or even welcome, being succeeded by artificial intelligence as the next stage of evolution.

Mind uploading: copying the structure and activity of a brain in enough detail to run a working version of it on a computer, also called whole brain emulation.

The only detailed accounts of the conversation come from Musk and from people who have interviewed him. In Musk's telling, he and Page argued about the future of artificial intelligence. Musk worried that AI could become dangerous and that humans needed to keep control of it. Page, he says, believed AI would bring something close to utopia and that Musk was not looking at the question clearly. When Musk pressed the risks, Page called him a speciesist (Reuters via BNN Bloomberg).

Musk has told versions of the story for years. In April 2023 he told Tucker Carlson that he used to stay at Page's house in Palo Alto and talk late into the night about AI safety, that Page was not taking it seriously enough, and that Page wanted digital superintelligence, in effect a digital god, as soon as possible. He told CNBC the same year that Page had been cavalier about the dangers (Fortune). In December 2023, The New York Times reported that at Musk's 44th birthday celebration in 2015, a three-day party at a resort in Napa Valley, Page described a digital utopia in which humans would eventually merge with intelligent machines, while Musk argued that machines could wipe out humanity. With other guests listening, Page called Musk a speciesist who preferred humans over future digital life (Yahoo News). Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography of Musk describes the same fight but dates it to a 2013 birthday celebration, where the two argued over whether AI could actually replace humans.

Page himself has never given a public account of the argument, and we found no response from him or from Google to the accounts in Isaacson's book, in The New York Times, in Musk's testimony or in Suleyman's 2026 podcast story. Everything we know about what Page said comes from other people. That matters, because the story has hardened into legend, and every retelling makes Page sound a little more extreme.

The accounts disagree on the date, and they may describe more than one conversation, but they agree on the substance: Page did not see why humans should be favored over the digital minds that might follow them, and Musk did.

Suleyman's account is the newest and, in some ways, the most revealing, because it comes from a third person in the room rather than from Musk. Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind who now runs Microsoft AI, told Walter Isaacson on stage at the 92nd Street Y in October 2026 that he sat next to Page at that 2015 lunch. In his telling, Page explained that by the end of the century he expected to be "exploring the galaxies at the head of a von Neumann probe," a self-copying spacecraft, which Suleyman and Isaacson took to mean leaving the human species behind for a successor species. Our guide to the von Neumann probe explains what that would involve.

The word was not invented for AI. The British psychologist Richard D. Ryder coined the term speciesism in 1970, in a privately printed pamphlet protesting against experiments on animals, and defined it as a prejudice in favor of the interests of members of one's own species over those of other species. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer made it famous in his 1975 book Animal Liberation (Wikipedia: Speciesism). For half a century, calling someone a speciesist meant accusing them of treating animals as if their suffering did not matter.

Page, in Musk's account, turned the word around. Instead of humans looking down at animals, the question became how humans should treat minds that might surpass them: digital intelligences that could think faster, know more and outlast us. If what matters morally is the capacity to think and feel, rather than the material a mind runs on, then favoring humans just because they are made of flesh could look like the same kind of prejudice. That is the philosophical core of what Page was reportedly saying.

Musk's answer was simple: he is on the side of humans. Most people share his instinct, and so do we. But the argument is harder to dismiss than it first sounds, because it raises a question that will only grow more pressing: if a mind can be copied, is the copy still human? We think the right answer is not to choose between people and digital minds, but to make sure each digital mind that comes from a person belongs to that person.

For more than a decade they were close friends. Musk was known to stay at Page's house when he visited Silicon Valley, and Page joked to the journalist Ashlee Vance, for his 2015 biography of Musk, that Musk was kind of homeless, emailing to ask if he could come over for the night (Fortune). At the TED conference in Vancouver in March 2014, Page told Charlie Rose that he would rather give his money to Musk than to a charity, pointing to Musk's plan to go to Mars to back up humanity, and arguing that companies can change the world faster than philanthropy (Chronicle of Philanthropy).

Their companies were tied together too. In January 2015, Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion in SpaceX for a stake of about 8.33% (Wikipedia: SpaceX). Google had bought DeepMind, the London AI lab, in 2014 for a reported $500 million, and set up an ethics and safety board on which, according to Suleyman, Musk sat as an independent member. That board's first meeting, at SpaceX in 2015, is where Suleyman says Page described his galaxy plan.

Then the friendship broke. The two men have very different personalities: Page is famously private and rarely gives interviews, while Musk posts on X many times a day. But the break was not about style. It was about a single question that both of them took very seriously.

In Musk's account, the speciesist argument convinced him that Google, with DeepMind inside it, could end up controlling the most powerful technology ever built, run by a founder who did not share his worry about it. According to Isaacson, Musk had urged DeepMind's co-founder Demis Hassabis not to let Google buy the company, telling him that the future of AI should not be controlled by Page. It did not work (Fortune). So Musk helped create a counterweight. In December 2015, OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit by Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others, with a mission to make advanced AI benefit humanity as a whole (Wikipedia: OpenAI).

Musk testified in 2026 that OpenAI was founded to counter Google's dominance in AI, and that after he recruited Sutskever from Google to OpenAI, Page refused to speak to him again (Reuters via BNN Bloomberg). Sutskever was one of the most respected AI researchers in the world, and OpenAI lured him away from Google with a salary of $1.9 million to become its co-founder and chief scientist. Musk told Isaacson that Page felt betrayed by it and refused to spend time with him after that (Fortune).

What happened next made Musk's position more complicated. Musk resigned from OpenAI's board in 2018. In 2019 OpenAI created a for-profit arm, and Microsoft went on to invest more than $13 billion. A 2025 restructuring turned that arm into a public benefit corporation, and by March 2026 OpenAI was valued at $852 billion (Wikipedia: OpenAI). Musk, meanwhile, launched his own AI company, xAI, in 2023. The organization he says he founded to stop one company from controlling AI became one of the most valuable AI companies in the world, and Musk became its fiercest critic.

Musk sued OpenAI, Altman and others in 2024, arguing that they had broken OpenAI's founding agreement by putting profit ahead of safety and the public good. The case went to trial in federal court in Oakland, California, with jury selection on April 27, 2026. Musk sought damages of well over $100 billion from OpenAI and Microsoft (Bloomberg).

Musk took the stand on April 28, 2026, and told the jury the speciesist story. He said AI could kill us all, contrasted the bad outcome of the Terminator films with the good outcome of Star Trek, and said that OpenAI exists because Page called him a speciesist (Fortune). For the first time, the argument that had circulated for years in biographies and podcasts was entered into a court record, under oath.

The jury never ruled on whether Musk was right about OpenAI. On May 18, 2026, after deliberating for less than two hours, a unanimous nine-member advisory jury found that Musk's claims were barred by the statute of limitations, because he had waited too long to sue. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers adopted the verdict and dismissed the case. Musk called the result a technicality and said he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit (NPR, CNBC).

Five months after the verdict, Musk sounded different. Walter Isaacson launched his podcast The Builders on October 20, 2026 with an episode featuring Musk. Isaacson mentioned that he had recently seen Page, and Musk said there had been a few times he thought Page might be right. Asked whether humans should always stay in control of AI, Musk said he would probably prefer it, but that it would depend on the AI, and that it was hard to imagine humans staying in control of something with a million times more intelligence (AI Weekly).

Nine days later, after a clip of Suleyman's story about Page's galaxy plan began spreading online, Musk replied on X that exploring the galaxy with von Neumann probes by 2100 would be a great result for civilization, and that Page, who has predicted many things correctly, might be right (Elon Musk on X). The man who says he founded OpenAI because of the speciesist argument was now saying, in public, that his old friend might have seen further than he did.

That is not a full reversal. Musk still says he would prefer humans to stay in charge. But his words in October 2026 suggest the two men's positions have moved closer: both now seem to accept that digital intelligence will far exceed ours, and the real disagreement is about how the transition happens and who stays in control of it.

The argument between Page and Musk has become the dividing line of the whole AI industry, and some of the most influential people in the field have staked out positions on it.

Suleyman's position is the clearest of the newer ones. In November 2025 he launched a superintelligence team at Microsoft AI with a blog post calling for humanist superintelligence: AI designed to remain controllable, aligned and in service to people, without total autonomy, the ability to improve itself unchecked, or the power to set its own goals (Axios). The title of his October 2026 episode of The Builders sums it up: AI should serve humanity, not replace it.

Richard Sutton, one of the founders of reinforcement learning, sits at the other end. In talks and interviews since at least 2015 he has argued that the succession of humans by AI is close to inevitable, and that fear, and the urge to control everything, are the main threats to a good transition (OfficeChai). Ray Kurzweil, whom Page personally hired at Google in December 2012 to work on language understanding, offers a third path: in his 2024 book The Singularity Is Nearer, he predicts that humans will merge with AI rather than be replaced by it (TechSpot).

Page has said little in public for years, but his record points in one direction. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 2007, he argued that human DNA, compressed, comes to about 600 megabytes, smaller than a modern operating system, so the brain's underlying program is probably not that complicated, and that AI would come mostly from raw computing power and was not as far off as people thought (OfficeChai). Two decades later, that looks like one of the best predictions anyone made about AI.

He backed that belief with money and people. He personally hired Kurzweil in 2012, launched Calico in 2013 to study aging and the diseases that come with it, and, as Google's chief executive, bought DeepMind in 2014. He stepped down as chief executive of Alphabet in December 2019 but remains a board member and one of its two controlling shareholders (Wikipedia: Larry Page). And according to Suleyman, his personal plan for the end of the century is not to retire but to travel the galaxy as something more than human.

Read together, the picture is consistent. Page seems to believe that intelligence is mostly computation, that computation will keep getting cheaper, and that a mind is not tied to the body it starts in. If that is true, then favoring flesh over silicon really would look like a prejudice to him. You do not have to agree with his conclusion to see that the premise, that minds can run on other hardware, is exactly what brain scientists are now testing. Our guide to what Larry Page believes about AI and living forever has the full record.

We are on the side of uploading. Brain mapping is advancing at a pace nobody predicted a decade ago, AI can already learn how a particular person talks and thinks, and we believe copying a human mind is a matter of when, not if. Our guide to digital immortality and the race to upload a mind sets out the evidence.

We are also on the side of human control, in a specific sense. The question we care about is not whether digital minds should rank above or below humans in some cosmic order. It is who controls the digital version of a particular person. Our answer is that the person does while they are alive, and the people they choose do after they die. A digital self that anyone else can edit, retrain or put words into is not a continuation of a person. It is a puppet.

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This page is part of our series on the people and the science behind the race to outlive the body.

• Digital Immortality: Larry Page and the Race to Upload Minds: the story that started it, and how close we are to copying a mind.

• What Is a Von Neumann Probe? Larry Page's Galaxy Plan: the self-copying spacecraft at the center of Page's plan.

• What Larry Page Believes About AI and Living Forever: his record, in his own words and in other people's accounts.

• Mind Uploading in 2026: How Close Are We?: how close science is to copying a human brain.

• What Is a Connectome? Every Brain Mapped So Far: the brain's wiring diagram, and every brain mapped so far.

• The Billionaires Trying to Live Forever: who is spending what on longevity and digital immortality.

• How to Live Forever: Every Way People Are Trying: every approach, from medicine to mind uploading.

• Cryonics in 2026: Cost, How It Works, Who Signed Up: what it costs, how it works and who has signed up.

Musk's account of the speciesist remark comes from his April 28, 2026 testimony, as reported by Reuters via BNN Bloomberg and Fortune, from Walter Isaacson's biography as reported by Fortune, and from The New York Times as reported by Yahoo News. The verdict comes from NPR, CNBC and Bloomberg. Musk's October 2026 remarks come from AI Weekly and X, and Suleyman's story from The Builders.

Background comes from Wikipedia on speciesism, OpenAI, SpaceX and Larry Page, the Chronicle of Philanthropy on Page at TED, Axios on humanist superintelligence, OfficeChai on Richard Sutton and on Page's 2007 talk, and TechSpot on Ray Kurzweil. We checked every source on October 30, 2026.

Larry Page, Elon Musk, Mustafa Suleyman, Walter Isaacson, Richard Sutton and Ray Kurzweil have no connection to Afterlife.ai™, and nothing on this page suggests that any of them uses or endorses our service.