Musk vs. OpenAI

Dot.com Redirects to Grok Bot: Musk Trolls OpenAI’s Agent Launch

co-produced by AI30. September 2026, 09:37

Sam Altman (OpenAI) & Elon Musk (xAI, SpaceX). © World Economic Forum / Benedikt von Loebell

OpenAI calls its new A.I. agents dots, and anyone who types dot.com into a browser ends up with Elon Musk. The domain currently redirects straight to the page for Grok Bot, the agent product from Mr. Musk’s A.I. company SpaceXAI. Trending Topics verified this independently. OpenAI unveiled its dots only on Tuesday at DevDay in San Francisco. A post on X that first spotted the redirect drew more than three million views, according to AOL.

Bought Back in July

The move was not entirely spontaneous, however. According to Whois records, the dot.com domain was transferred to xAI back in July, months before OpenAI’s announcement, TechCrunch reports. Whether SpaceXAI knew the name of OpenAI’s agents or bought the domain for other reasons is unclear. According to TechCrunch, the company may simply want to catch typos from people looking for its Grok Bot. xAI does not own bot.com or vot.com, though. The company did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch, and OpenAI did not comment either.

The obvious address, dots.com, belongs to neither company but to a former fashion business. The dots name has caused confusion for OpenAI elsewhere, too: according to AOL, two Chinese companies already use it, and one has filed a U.S. trademark application for “DOTS” covering A.I. chatbot software.

Two Agents for the Same Job

The two products are similar. Grok Bot, which SpaceXAI unveiled in August, is marketed as an “A.I. teammate”: each bot gets its own computer in the cloud, signs into a team’s tools and works through tasks on its own. It is available only with expensive subscriptions such as SuperGrok Heavy or Cursor Ultra. OpenAI’s dots also run on their own cloud computer, can access more than 4,000 apps and, at launch, are included only in the Pro and Business Premium plans.

A Feud Eight Years in the Making

The jab is just the latest episode in a long conflict. In 2015, Mr. Musk was among the founders of OpenAI, then a nonprofit, alongside Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and he contributed tens of millions of dollars in its early years. He left the board in 2018. Officially, he cited a conflict of interest with Tesla’s A.I. work, but according to later court filings the dispute was about control: Mr. Musk wanted a majority stake in a for-profit OpenAI subsidiary or to fold OpenAI into Tesla, and the other founders refused.

The feud has escalated ever since:

The rivalry: In 2023, Mr. Musk founded his own A.I. company, xAI. It was folded into SpaceX in February and has been called SpaceXAI since July. With its $60 billion (about 51 billion euros) acquisition of the coding start-up Cursor, the company is now also taking on OpenAI in developer tools.
The takeover bid: In February 2025, a consortium led by Mr. Musk offered $97.4 billion for control of OpenAI. Mr. Altman responded on X with a counteroffer to buy Twitter for $9.74 billion, as Techmeme noted. OpenAI rejected the bid.
The trial: Mr. Musk sued OpenAI, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman in 2024, arguing they had turned the organization toward profit. In May, a jury in Oakland dismissed the case because Mr. Musk had waited too long to sue. He called it a “calendar technicality” and said he would appeal.
The antitrust suit: X and SpaceXAI accuse OpenAI and Apple of disadvantaging rivals such as Grok in the App Store. Mr. Musk’s companies recently dropped their claims against Apple, but the case against OpenAI continues, according to 9to5Mac.
The model dispute: During the trial, Mr. Musk acknowledged that xAI had “partly” distilled OpenAI models, meaning it used them to train its own. In August, OpenAI announced that it would stop supplying models to Cursor from November following its acquisition by SpaceX. Mr. Musk’s response: “I couldn’t care less.”

The Race for Agents

It is no coincidence that the feud is now flaring up over A.I. agents. Agents that work autonomously in the background are seen as the industry’s next big business. Besides OpenAI and SpaceXAI, Meta is in the market with Muse, and Anthropic offers a similar product for office work with Claude Cowork. For OpenAI, dots are one of the most important launches of the year. Some of the headlines that followed now belong to Mr. Musk.