Elon Musk and a group of investors offered more than $97 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls the artificial intelligence giant OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, on Monday.
The bid, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, escalates a long-standing feud between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The pair co-founded the company as a nonprofit in 2015, but Musk left several years later and has been engaged in a legal tussle over its control for several years.
Altman replied to the unsolicited offer on X, Musk’s social media site formally called Twitter, with a short rejection: “No thank you.”
“But we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” Altman added.
Musk issued a terse retort of his own, calling Altman a “swindler.”
The Tesla billionaire bought X in 2022 for $44 billion. He now has his own AI company called xAI.
OpenAI is working to turn itself into a for-profit company and is on track to become one of the most valuable companies on earth. But Musk’s offer could complicate those plans and add fire to his lawsuits claiming OpenAI’s restructuring plans go against its initial founding mission.
OpenAI’s structure is unique in that the nonprofit entity, run by a board of directors, controls its business and for-profit activities. The restructuring would spin off the nonprofit with some sort of compensation deal that could then be used to advance charitable AI causes. But it would no longer have control over OpenAI’s business, allowing the new for-profit entity to bring in hordes of cash.
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“If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI Inc. board of directors are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time,” Marc Toberoff, an attorney representing Musk, told The New York Times.
OpenAI was recently valued at $157 billion. The company is also set to complete a new fundraising round that includes a $40 billion investment from SoftBank. Once finalized, that would see the company’s value somewhere around the $300 billion mark.