Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reignited his long running friction with Chess.com after commenting on a discussion about the future of chess and artificial intelligence. Musk argued that the number of genuinely useful moves in chess is relatively small and predicted that the game will eventually be completely “solved” by AI. His comments quickly drew a sarcastic response from Chess.com, which replied with the phrase “skill issue,” turning the discussion into an online exchange. Musk continued defending his position, saying chess may be extremely difficult for humans but is comparatively easy for computers.

He suggested that people can still enjoy chess even if machines eventually become vastly superior at the game, drawing comparisons with other games where computers already outperform humans. Chess.com then pushed back by pointing to the enormous number of possible chess games, arguing that the sheer scale of the game makes completely solving it an extraordinary computational challenge. Musk responded that the platform was confusing the total number of possible games with the number of legal chess positions. The latest exchange has an added layer of history. In December 2022, Chess.com published a roughly 1,000 word article titled “Why Elon Musk Doesn't And Can't Play Chess,” examining Musk's own comments about why he had stopped playing the game. The article noted that Musk had played chess as a child but later described the game as too simple for his interests.

That earlier article became part of the broader Musk versus Chess.com lore, making the latest argument more entertaining for chess followers. The current dispute, however, is less about Musk's personal playing ability and more about whether advances in AI could eventually make chess a mathematically solved game.The debate also highlights a larger question surrounding AI and strategy games. Modern chess engines are already dramatically stronger than even the world's best human players, but being able to play chess at superhuman strength is different from completely solving the game something that would require determining the theoretically correct outcome from every possible legal position.For now, Musk and Chess.com appear to agree on at least one thing: AI has fundamentally changed chess. The disagreement is over just how far that transformation can go and whether machines will eventually leave humans with nothing left to discover on the chessboard.