Elon Musk Says AI Will Solve Chess: Chess.com Fights Back with 10^120, but Who Is Right?

A short post on X by Elon Musk quietly triggered an unusual contest with Chess.com. When the xAI founder claimed chess would soon be solved by AI, the world's largest online chess platform immediately fired back with the number 10^120. To casual observers, this was just an entertaining exchange. To someone who has worked with sports data for decades, this was a stress test of how people use numbers to support their own narratives. The debate is not new. In 2026, Musk cancelled a chess event at Tesla. In 2026, he triggered controversy by saying chess is too simple for real life because it lacks fog of war, a tech tree and unequal starting positions. This time he made a stronger claim: a future superintelligence could find ways to compress information far beyond human imagination and thereby solve chess entirely. Chess.com's reply was fast and sharp. It cited 10^120 possible chess games and compared that with the number of atoms in the observable universe. The platform's social media operator even added a playful response in Vietnamese, which is notable because the Vietnamese-speaking chess community has grown rapidly. But why did Chess.com need to react so quickly? The answer lies in public perception. Elon Musk has more than 200 million followers on X. If such an influential figure says chess will soon be solved, people outside the chess world could easily fall into the misunderstanding that the game is becoming pointless. That could reduce sponsorship, media attention and the number of new players. Chess.com understands this risk better than most. Technically speaking, two related but distinct concepts are often confused: legal positions and possible games. Chess has around 10^44 legal positions. This is already a huge number, but it is far smaller than 10^120. Chess.com's figure of 10^120 refers to possible games, that is, the different move sequences from the starting position through to the end of a game. The game tree grows exponentially and that is why solving all of chess remains computationally infeasible in the near future. Musk's statement is not entirely wrong in a broad sense: nobody can prove that a future superintelligence will never discover an information-compression breakthrough. But an untestable hypothesis is not a scientific argument. It resembles an appeal to faith in the power of AI more than a rigorous analysis of game complexity. To understand this more clearly, take the definition of a solved game. To solve a game means that, from every legal position, and under the assumption that both sides play perfectly, the optimal outcome of a win, loss or draw is known. Checkers has been fully solved after an extensive computational project. Its number of legal positions is around 10^31, which is still enormously smaller than chess's 10^44. In other words, the computational barrier for solving chess is much higher than the one for checkers. Some people argue that AlphaZero and modern engines prove that computers can outplay humans without solving the whole game. That is true. But playing well and solving a game are two entirely different tasks. AlphaZero does not need to know the optimal result from every position. It only needs to find a strategy strong enough to defeat a particular opponent within a time limit. Thus, AI success at playing chess does not contradict the fact that chess remains unsolved. Another interesting twist is Musk's own situation. In 2026, xAI's Grok 4 took part in an AI-versus-AI chess tournament. According to data from the analysis, Grok 4 lost to OpenAI's o3. If Musk really had a superintelligence capable of miracle-level chess solving, it did not show that ability in the 2026 tournament. Grok 4's performance suggests the AI chess race is still open and xAI is not always leading. Personally, I tend toward an uncomfortable conclusion: the number 10^120 does not prove exactly what Chess.com wants it to prove. It proves that solving chess in the traditional way is infeasible in the near future. But computer science is not limited to traditional approaches. Intelligent algorithms can dramatically narrow the search space. Therefore, anyone claiming that chess will never be solved is making the same mistake as Musk: turning an empirical statement into an absolute truth. More important is the impact of this public exchange on the chess industry. When a celebrity claims chess will soon become irrelevant, some parents may hesitate to encourage their children to learn chess. Sponsors may also become reluctant to fund tournaments. But exactly in such moments, chess organizations need to focus on long-term data instead of panicking. The COVID-19 pandemic once stopped football but also created an unprecedented wave of online chess learning. When people could not go outside, they turned to intellectual games to connect with each other. Elon Musk may not understand why millions of people still love chess even when machines are far stronger. But that does not matter. Chess is not only a puzzle to be solved. It is an intellectual sport, a playground of creativity, a cultural language across borders and a place where humans learn to confront failure. Even if a future superintelligence finds a way to solve chess, that will not be different from knowing the ending of a play while still wanting to watch the actors perform on stage. When data does not lie, we are the ones who lie to ourselves. Musk deceives himself by reducing a game to an information-compression problem. Chess.com could also deceive itself if it believes one giant number will erase all doubt. Chess fans should treat this debate as a sign that AI is entering the intellectual life of humanity, not as a death knell. From the angle of sports business and governance, the Musk-Chess.com story carries an important lesson: the value of a sports brand lies not in contracts or follower counts, but in its ability to respond quickly to shifts in perception. Chess.com turned an attack from a tech billionaire into a colorful media campaign. It not only defended its reputation but also reinforced its position as a leading storyteller for chess around the world. That is why Chess.com is willing to use Vietnamese, Spanish or Hindi in social media campaigns. The company understands that chess audiences are shifting strongly toward Asia and Southeast Asia. Vietnam, with its rich tradition of chess and Chinese chess, is becoming an important market. A small detail like a reply in Vietnamese can generate a stronger viral effect than any press release. From the perspective of someone who has followed the sports market for nearly three decades, I see that this kind of public dispute rarely changes market fundamentals, but it always changes the way stories are told. Previously, people discussed chess through titles and Elo ratings. Now they discuss it through legal positions, possible game counts and the power of neural networks. That is both an opportunity and a challenge. There is an opportunity because new technology-oriented audiences will explore chess more. There is a challenge because once the story is framed as machine versus human, the humanistic value of chess may become obscured. Sports media professionals must stay alert and avoid falling into that trap. The next question will not be whether AI can solve chess, but whether we are misreading the numbers we create. When Elon Musk sees 10^44 positions and thinks AI will compress them into a short formula, he may miss the most wonderful point: humans do not need a formula to appreciate the beauty of sacrificing a queen to create checkmate. For everyone who loves chess, the final message from this verbal match is simple. Keep playing, keep watching young players and keep telling stories with data. But never forget that behind every statistical table there is a human being seeking joy, challenge and meaning. Data is only a mirror. It reflects ourselves, with all of our beliefs, biases and aspirations. In a world where AI grows smarter every day, the value of chess does not lie in who wins or loses against a machine. It lies in whether human beings still have the courage to sit down and face themselves. That is a question that no algorithm can answer for us.