Elon Musk-led group offers $97.4 billion to control OpenAI: report

A group of investors led by Elon Musk made a $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, marking the next step in a years-long battle between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The unsolicited offer was put forward on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported, by Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff. In it, Musk proposed converting OpenAI to a for-profit company and potentially merging it with his own artificial intelligence company.

The bid was turned down by Altman, who wrote on X, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want” — using both X’s former name and a counteroffer number that mocked Musk’s bid by moving the decimal one point to the left.

Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015. After Musk left in 2019, Altman became CEO and created a for-profit subsidiary within the company. The subsidiary allowed OpenAI to raise money from Microsoft and other investors, but Musk has filed many legal complaints accusing OpenAI of betraying its original nonprofit mission.

Altman is in the process of turning the OpenAI subsidiary into a traditional for-profit company. But in order to separate OpenAI from the nonprofit, Altman has to compensate the nonprofit — for example, with a one-time payment or a minority stake, The New York Times explained.

The nonprofit’s assets have not been given a value yet, and Musk’s bid complicates matters by assigning a number value to it. Now that the nonprofit has a multibillion-dollar valuation, Altman and OpenAI will likely have to spend more to gain independence from it.

“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,” Toberoff said in a statement on Musk’s bid.

Altman spoke about the bid on Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television at the Paris AI Action Summit. 

“Elon tries all sorts of things for a long time. This is the latest — you know, this week’s episode,” Altman said. “I think he’s probably just trying to slow us down.”