A consortium led by Elon Musk has bid $97.4bn to buy ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff said the Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur has submitted the bid for all assets of the tech company.
The consortium includes Musk’s own AI company x.AI and several private equity firms including Baron Capital Group and Valor Management.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who co-founded the firm with Musk in 2015 as a non-profit, posted his response on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter which Musk acquired in a $44bn deal in 2022.
He wrote: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
Musk, who left OpenAI in 2018 and subsequently founded x.AI, responded: “Swindler.”
Altman has forced through a restructuring of OpenAI’s board to become a for-profit firm, which Musk claims to have taken issue with. Last year the entrepreneur sued OpenAI twice over the restructure.
“At x.AI, we live by the values I was promised OpenAI would follow. We’ve made Grok open source, and we respect the rights of content creators,” Musk said in a statement.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens.”
His lawyer Toberoff added: “If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI 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.
“As the co-founder of OpenAI and the most innovative and successful tech industry leader in history, Musk is the person best positioned to protect and grow OpenAI’s technology.”
He added that the consortium would be prepared to match or exceed any rival bids for OpenAI, which was valued at $157bn in its latest funding round in October 2024.
Musk is an advisor to Donald Trump but the returning US President recently included OpenAI in a group of AI companies to work on a $500bn deal – ‘Stargate’ – which aims to build the US’ AI infrastructure. x.AI was not included. Altman attended his inauguration.
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