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Magnus Carlsen defends Elon Musk for not having ‘the greatest respect for chess players'
Magnus Carlsen spoke about Elon Musk during an AI chess exhibition tournament, where the world No. 1 was also commentating.
Recently, Magnus Carlsen revealed that Elon Musk ‘famously doesn’t have the greatest respect for chess players’. The Norwegian said that he has seen the tech billionaire in person, and he understands Musk’s opinion on chess as ‘it is not a very complicated game’.
Carlsen spoke about Musk during an AI chess exhibition tournament, where the world No. 1 was also commentating. Carlsen also wasn’t impressed by the chess abilities of some of the best general-purpose large language models like Grok 4, o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, etc.
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Magnus Carlsen on why Elon Musk ‘doesn’t have the greatest respect for chess'
“Elon I’ve seen in person but I haven’t talked to him. You know he famously doesn’t have the greatest respect for chess players or the game which, to some extent, I understand because it is not a very complicated game, right? It is very simple in many ways but I think that’s also the beauty of the game. Like it’s obviously simple since it took computers not that long to master it, right? Compared to some other games. But chess is also rich and very difficult to play as well. Like it’s simple enough to play that you can get joy from playing after practice. Like not maybe immediately but after practice practicing a bit but hard enough that you can never actually get particularly good at it as a human which we’ve found out by seeing engines play,” he said.
Carlsen also had an anecdote about Facebook’’s Mark Zuckerberg. He said, “He didn’t know much chess, but he was a little bit the same as Sam Altman. I thought he was even better. Was learning very, very quickly, he was forming his own opinions very quickly, which I thought was impressive. It’s a useful skill. They were not necessarily right, which you wouldn’t expect, but they were always well-reasoned.”
Carlsen was recently present at the Esports World Cup chess tournament in Riyadh, where he defeated Alireza Firouzja in the finals.
