--- title: "Elon Musk Is Insisting He Knows More About Chess Than Chess.com" description: "Elon Musk went on a tired about chess, saying it would be \"fully solved\" while arguing with Chess.com about the game's possibilities." date: "2026-09-07" modified: "2026-09-07" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore.md" url: "https://futurism.com/future-society/elon-musk-argues-chess" categories: - "Elon Musk" - "Future Society" - "The Industrialists" --- # Elon Musk Is Insisting He Knows More About Chess Than Chess.com ![Elon Musk is seated in a white chair, holding a microphone in his right hand and gesturing with his left hand. He is wearing a black suit jacket over a white shirt. The background features Italian text and the colors of the Italian flag.]() 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. **More on Elon Musk:** [*Elon Musk Is Having One of His All-Time Meltdowns*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()