Elon Musk drifted from Larry Page over a decade ago, but their companies are closer than ever
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- Google's $900 million SpaceX investment from 2015, made the same year Musk and Page's friendship frayed, has ballooned to a stake worth more than $100 billion following SpaceX's record IPO.
- Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as an explicit "counterweight" to Google DeepMind, recruiting researcher Ilya Sutskever away from DeepMind to help build the lab.
- Google's Waymo has pulled decisively ahead in robotaxis, operating thousands of vehicles providing more than 500,000 paid trips weekly across 11 cities, while Tesla runs only about 50 Robotaxi-branded vehicles, mostly in Austin.
- SpaceX flipped from Google Cloud customer to provider, announcing a deal to lease AI compute capacity to Google for $920 million per month over 32 months — a potential $30 billion in revenue — just ahead of its IPO.
- Sergey Brin filed for divorce from Nicole Shanahan shortly after learning of Musk's alleged December 2021 affair with her at Art Basel Miami; Musk denied the affair and posted a selfie with Brin to dispute any rift.
- The new $920 million/month deal can be terminated by Google after a one-month grace period if SpaceX fails to deliver the promised AI chips by September 30.
Why it matters: SpaceX's $920 million-per-month AI compute deal with Google — a role reversal from its 2021 cloud-customer arrangement — now anchors Musk's AI revenue while Alphabet's 2015 $900 million SpaceX bet has grown past $100 billion, making the financial bond between two men who stopped being friends over AI nearly impossible to unwind.
