Magnus Carlsen, the world’s best chess player, recently gave a frank and intelligent response to tech giant Elon Musk’s well-known negative opinion of chess. During a commentary session for an AI chess exhibition match, Carlsen said something that gave us a rare look into the thinking of a master who, although disagreeing with Musk, also sees some validity in what he says.
Carlsen was asked about Musk during the event, which featured top general-purpose large language models like Grok 4 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. He said that even though he has met the SpaceX and X CEO in person, they have never talked. Carlsen said, “You know he doesn’t have a lot of respect for chess players or the game, which I can understand to some extent.” He said that chess is “not a very complicated game” at its core.
Carlsen went into more detail about this comment that seems to contradict itself. He said that the game’s greatest beauty is also its simplicity. He admitted that computers could learn chess faster than they could learn other games, which showed how simple it is at its core. But then he talked about how hard and deep it is to play at a high level.
“It’s easy enough to play that you can have fun playing after practice, but hard enough that you can never really get very good at it as a person,” Carlsen remarked, pointing to the fact that chess machines always beat human players as the best proof. This small difference shows that Carlsen gets Musk’s point of view from a purely technical point of view, but he also knows how people perceive the game in a way that a computer or a billionaire might not.
Carlsen also told a story about another tech billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg. He said that Zuckerberg wasn’t a good gamer, but the way he played the game was impressive. Carlsen said that Zuckerberg was “even better” than OpenAI’s Sam Altman at learning quickly and coming up with his own well-thought-out ideas, even if they weren’t always right.
Recently, the chess grandmaster appeared at the Esports World Cup chess competition in Riyadh, where he beat Alireza Firouzja in the finals. This win added to his already legendary career.