An Elon Musk-led group of investors put in an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid on the nonprofit that runs OpenAI—the latest iteration of an ongoing beef between Musk and the artificial intelligence company’s CEO, Sam Altman.
Altman has been working toward restructuring the company that owns ChatGPT to a for-profit firm, a move Musk has openly criticized. The billionaire pair, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit, are currently in the midst of a court battle over the company’s restructuring, a move that OpenAI has claimed will help them build their best AI models.
In 2019, with Musk gone and Altman at the helm of the company, it created a for-profit branch to get cash from Microsoft and others.
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The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the news of Musk’s bid for the company.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement from his attorney, Marc Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.”
The Tesla CEO and ally of President Donald Trump left before the company became the success it now is, and has since launched a competitor: xAI, run as part of his social media platform, which was previously known as Twitter.
In a lawsuit challenging OpenAI’s restructuring, Musk said that he was told by founders that the nonprofit was initially created to use AI for the benefit of humanity, and now has shifted its priority to making money.
Altman, however, was unamused by Musk’s takeover bid, using his rival’s own social media platform X to fire back at the SpaceX founder.
“No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” he wrote.
It is unclear how much the nonprofit is worth, despite Musk’s high bid. Musk’s attorney did say that they are willing to match or go higher than any other bids.
Investors in the group include Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and others.
“If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI Inc. Board of Directors are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation,” Musk said, “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.”
