Elon Musk hurls insults at Vinod Khosla after VC founder tries to poach Musk's employees
Marc Piasecki, Kimberly White/Getty Images
- VC founder Vinod Khosla on Monday accused Elon Musk of promoting racism.
- Khosla urged employees at Musk's companies to quit and "join our portfolio."
- Musk fired back at Khosla, hurling a few insults at the billionaire VC.
Elon Musk is going scorched-earth with Vinod Khosla after the billionaire VC founder accused the Tesla CEO of promoting racism and made an open call to Musk's employees to quit.
On Monday evening, Khosla said on X that Musk frames racism as a "great and desirable paradigm," responding to a September post from the CEO in which Musk said "white people are a rapidly diminishing minority of global population."
The Tesla CEO has promoted posts in the past regarding changing demographics around the white population.
In his post, Khosla called on employees at Musk's companies to ditch their employers and join Khosla Ventures' portfolio, which includes AI startups such as OpenAI and Replit.
"All non-whites in @tesla, @SpaceX @X etc and all decent whites should quit and join our portfolio," Khosla, an Indian-American who immigrated to the US in the 1970s, wrote. "Email us your linkedin!"
Musk fired insults at Khosla in response, calling the VC a "pompous asshole" and a slur for people with intellectual disabilities.
"Vinod, you're not just such a pompous asshole that you tried to stop the public from using a public beach near your house…" Musk wrote. "My partner, Shivon, is half Indian and my eldest son with her is named in honor of the great Indian physicist Chandrasekhar."
Musk appeared to be referring to Khosla's yearslong attempt to block public access to a beach near the VC's home on the Peninsula coast in San Mateo County. Khosla has fought for years against public access to Martins Beach, which runs through his $37 million estate, and has filed multiple lawsuits over the issue.
Khosla and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two billionaires have clashed before. In 2024, Khosla declined to endorse President Donald Trump after Musk urged the VC to vote for a Trump-Vance ticket. The VC has also called Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI "a bit of sour grapes."
Khosla's most recent comment on Musk came just hours after he spoke out against the ICE shooting in Minneapolis.
"Macho ICE vigilantes running amuck empowered by a conscious-less administration," Khosla wrote. "The video was sickening to watch and the storytelling without facts or with invented fictitious facts by authorities almost unimaginable in a civilized society."
The VC founder was just one of many business and tech leaders who spoke out on social media to denounce the ICE shooting.