Chess.com's X account made an enemy out of Elon Musk this week after disproving the Tesla CEO’s theory on the game.
It started Thursday when Musk replied to a viral X post breaking down chess's exponential branching, writing that "the actual number of moves that are not utterly stupid in chess is tiny and chess will be fully solved one day." The @chesscom account dissed him with two words: "Skill issue.”
Musk escalated, replying, "Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers. One day, it will be fully solved like checkers. Between now and then, or even after, have fun. People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better."
Chess.com came back with an emphasis on the near-infinite amount of game possibilities: "There are more possible chess games, by about 40 orders of magnitude, than atoms in the observable universe. To solve chess, you'd have to map all of them. Good luck.”
But Musk doubled down, calling the atom comparison "an idiotic metric" and arguing the number of legal chess positions is roughly 40 orders of magnitude fewer than the atom count. He backed the point with a Grok-generated answer, though that response opened by conceding it had overstated the storage claim. Both sides were, technically, talking about different things: Chess.com cited possible chess games, a figure around 10^120 known as the Shannon number, while Musk cited legal chess positions, approximately 4.6 x 10^44.
The exchange got under Musk's skin. He ended one reply with a face-palm emoji, writing: "Here I am arguing with some random intern at a chess website."
The admin corrected the record flatly: "I'm a full-time employee." Musk responded with a coughing emoji. Chess.com executive Daniel Rensch publicly confirmed the employee's status; the admin marked the moment with "thank you to Mr Bossman."
This (unsurprisingly) isn’t the first time Musk started beef in the chess world. After his 2022 comments calling chess "too simple to be useful in real life," Chess.com published a nearly 1,000-word rebuttal titled "Why Elon Musk Doesn't — And Can't — Play Chess," dispelling his claim the game is too limiting.
