Is being the world’s richest man not enough for Elon Musk?
He must also have us all believe that he’s a genius, sui generis, with a mind so mighty that it’s wasted on supposedly intellectual pastimes like “chess.”
He’s so convinced that the board game is beneath him, in fact, that he’s begun arguing about it with… Chess.com, a leading source of expertise and chess AI.
The inane saga kicked off yesterday on X — where else — when Musk responded to a post about all the possible moves you can make in chess. To a mind as omniscient as Musk’s, the number — a mere 40 orders of magnitude more than all the atoms in the observable universe — wasn’t sufficiently large enough to be interesting.
“The actual number of moves that are not utterly stupid in chess is tiny,” he claimed, “and chess will be fully solved one day.”
Here, Chess.com entered the fray by responding with a succinct rejoinder: “skill issue.”
The bait worked.
“Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers. One day, it will be fully solved like checkers,” Musk wrote, essentially repeating himself. “Between now and then, or even after, have fun. People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better.”
Indeed, humans who aren’t intelligent as Musk, in their feeble-mindedness and fleeting time on this planet, may enjoy activities such as games and sports, blissfully unaware that a hypothetical machine may hypothetically make mince meat of those activities one day. And yet, as Musk admitted, he’s choosing to waste his time “arguing with some random intern.” (“I’m a full-time employee,” the Chess.com account clarified.)
Musk also went on about how an artificial superintelligence — something we don’t even know is possible to build — will “figure out ways to solve and compress that are far beyond what we could possibly comprehend.” Then he cited some conversations he had with his personal AI chatbot, Grok, as if that put matters to bed.
There’s certainly an interesting intellectual debate to be had about “solving” chess — something that actual mathematicians have explored and tried to tackle — but Musk’s arguments seem to be driven solely by contempt. The board game is a long-held bugbear of his.
Back in 2022, in a now infamous tweet, Musk wrote about how he stopped playing chess as a child because he “found it to be too simple to be useful in real life,” before extolling how Polytopia, a mobile game, was the superior activity of choice for the cognoscenti.
He had something similar to say amid his battle with Chess.com. Responding to another account, Musk wrote that he “felt diminishing returns from chess in terms of transfer learning to understand reality.” Next time your opponent destroys you at chess, you might try deploying that excuse, too.
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Facts Only
* Elon Musk responded to a post about all possible chess moves.
* Musk claimed the number of non-stupid chess moves is tiny and that chess will be fully solved one day.
* Chess.com responded with "skill issue."
* Musk stated that chess is hard for humans but not for computers, suggesting machines will solve it.
* Musk mentioned an artificial superintelligence will figure out solutions beyond human comprehension.
* Musk cited conversations with his AI chatbot Grok as context.
* In 2022, Musk wrote he stopped playing chess as a child because he found it too simple for real-life use.
* Musk expressed feeling diminishing returns from chess in terms of transfer learning to understand reality.
Executive Summary
Full Take
The exchange reveals a tension between an individual’s perception of intellectual pursuit and the objective capabilities of computational systems. Musk frames the discussion through a lens of contempt, suggesting that human engagement with chess is inherently flawed or beneath his notice, positioning theoretical solutions by AI as the only meaningful path forward. The move from arguing about game theory to asserting the superiority of machine capability over human cognition highlights a broader pattern where complex intellectual activities are recontextualized—from genuine exploration into mere distractions unworthy of high-level thought. The juxtaposition of Musk's highly publicized views on learning and real-world utility with the abstract nature of chess and AI solutions suggests an underlying skepticism about the efficacy of purely cognitive pursuits when compared to machine processing power. This dynamic implies a potential revaluation of human intellectual effort, where mastery is increasingly measured by the ability to interface with or direct superintelligence rather than internalizing traditional forms of knowledge. The core implication for human agency rests on whether this shift in focus serves to elevate understanding or merely to dismiss experience that does not align with technological paradigms.
Bridge Questions: If objective solutions are forthcoming, how should individuals value the experiential and cultural aspects of complex games like chess? Does framing intellectual pursuits solely as tools for engineering outcomes inadvertently devalue intrinsic human discovery? What is the long-term consequence if the benchmark for intellectual worth shifts entirely toward computational problem-solving?