Elon Musk’s competitors Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos say Musk won’t use his position to hurt competition

Elon Musk wasn’t at the New York Times DealBook Summit yesterday, but he was one of the elephants in the room. The big question: whether Musk will use his new governmental position to favor his own businesses and hurt his rivals.

Musk’s two major competitors in the room — Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos (who competes with Musk in his AI and rocket businesses) and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who competes with Musk in AI) — downplayed the likelihood that the Tesla Technoking would do such a thing.

Or perhaps they hoped that by saying so out loud it would make it true.

Altman:

“It would be profoundly un-American to use political power — to the degree that Elon has it — to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses. I don’t think people would tolerate that and I don’t think Elon would do it.”

Bezos:

“I take it at face value what has been said, which is that he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors. I could be wrong about that but I think it could be true... I’ve had a lot of success in life not being cynical, and I’ve very rarely been taken advantage of. It’s happened a couple of times, but not very often.”