Elon Musk escalated his feud with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman on Monday. The billionaire is leading a consortium of investors that announced it had submitted a bid of $97.4bn for “all assets” of the artificial intelligence company to OpenAI’s board of directors.
The startup, which operates ChatGPT, has been working to restructure itself away from its original non-profit status. OpenAI also operates a for-profit subsidiary, and Musk’s unsolicited offer could complicate the company’s plans. The Wall Street Journal first reported the proposed bid.
“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,” said Marc Toberoff, the attorney representing the investors.
Altman posted his reaction on X shortly after the news broke, saying, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Musk famously bought Twitter in 2022 for $44bn and renamed it X. Musk responded to that post, saying, “Swindler.”
Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI but left the company in 2019 and started his own AI company called xAI. Over the past several years, he’s tussled with Altman over the direction of the company. He sued OpenAI over the company’s re-structuring plans last year, dropped the suit, then re-filed it.
The bid is backed by xAI and several investment firms, including one run by Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the stealth government contractor Palantir. Ari Emanuel, who’s the CEO of the entertainment company Endeavor, has also joined the group through his investment fund.
“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.”
Toberoff told the Wall Street Journal that Musk’s consortium of investors is ready to match or go higher than any other bids on OpenAI that may arise.
OpenAI has maintained that its restructuring is essential to the longevity of the company and being able to access capital. It has said that if it keeps its non-profit structure as is, it won’t be able to keep up in the highly competitive world of AI innovation. OpenAI said it plans for the restructuring to be done by 2026.
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Although Musk is a close Donald Trump ally, Altman has also met with the president and attended his inauguration. Trump tapped OpenAI to be part of a group of AI companies to work on a $500bn deal called Stargate to invest in the burgeoning technology. Musk’s xAI is not part of this deal.