Musk submits $94.7 billion bid for control of OpenAI

A consortium led by Elon Musk has offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The deal comes months after the owner of X and Tesla sued the artificial intelligence startup to prevent it from transitioning to a for-profit company, deepening tensions between the tech tycoon and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the company’s future.

The offer is well below OpenAI’s market value, which Bloomberg puts at around $300 billion. Therefore, it can be viewed as a hostile provocation to which Altman responded with a message on Musk’s social media platform X: “No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Musk, who also has his own artificial intelligence business, xAI, paid $44 billion for Twitter in 2022, a price that was considered well above its real value at the time. Musk replied with the same kind of flippant tone that seems to dominate the U.S. public sphere these days: “Scam Altman.”

In the past, Musk and Altman had a good relationship: the two founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit. But that selfless goal changed in 2019, when Musk was no longer part of the company: Altman created a subsidiary that did pursue profit and that was what allowed him to catapult OpenAI to another dimension, thanks to the influx of funding from Microsoft, among other investors, and the AI tool ChatGPT, which was a milestone in Silicon Valley. Right now OpenAI is immersed in a process to become a traditional company while maintaining a small area with the original structure and goals of the foundation.

“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, a lawyer representing the investors, in a statement on Monday. Toberoff added that the time has come for OpenAI to return to open-source code and focus on security once more.

The relationship between the two Silicon Valley moguls has deteriorated greatly since their split. Musk’s proximity to President Donald Trump did not prevent Altman from going to the White House to sign a commitment with Oracle and SoftBank worth $500 billion to develop AI over the next four years, in an operation called Stargate. The move angered Musk, who was the largest donor to Trump’s campaign and now plays a key role in the new administration, which has tasked him with making spending cuts. That Altman was able to override the Tesla owner speaks to how volatile the new president’s loyalties can be.

The feud between the two has since spilled into the courts: Musk has filed a series of lawsuits accusing OpenAI of betraying its original spirit by seeking profit and partnering with Microsoft to dominate AI development. When filing one of those lawsuits, Musk’s lawyers argued that from the moment Microsoft partnered with OpenAI, it shifted its focus to making money, which was at odds with its founding spirit. “OpenAI, Inc. has transformed itself into a de facto closed-source subsidiary of the world’s largest technology company: Microsoft,” the lawsuit filed in San Francisco said. “Under its new board of directors, it is not only developing, but also refining, AGI [general AI, which can match or exceed human capabilities] to maximize Microsoft’s profits, rather than for the benefit of humanity.”

Despite Musk’s expressed concern for the future of the human species, he nevertheless has his own artificial intelligence start-up, xAI, which is a for-profit business.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition