Elon Musk offers $97 billion to buy OpenAI

A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk has submitted a proposal to the OpenAI board of directors to buy the nonprofit organization that controls the ChatGPT chatbot for $97.4 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the offer via the social network X: “No, thanks, but if you want, we can buy Twitter for $9.74 billion.” Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion and renamed it X.

Musk is one of the co-founders of OpenAI (he left the company’s board of directors in 2018), and he has opposed the company’s transition to commercial operations. Musk sued OpenAI and Altman over the company's commercialization. He believes that OpenAI has de facto become a closed-source subsidiary of Microsoft.

"It's time for OpenAI to return to open source," Musk says.

The businessman backed his artificial intelligence startup X.AI (founded in March 2023), which could merge with OpenAI after the deal. He also received support from several investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital, 8VC and others.

In January, the businessman's lawyer, Mark Toberoff, sent a letter to the attorneys general of California and Delaware (where OpenAI is registered) requesting an auction to sell his stake. In turn, OpenAI called Musk's legal objections groundless. In December, the company released documents showing that Musk had supported the commercialization of OpenAI but had left it because he could not gain control.

The day after the inauguration, Donald Trump and Altman presented a plan to invest up to $500 billion in American data centers over the next four years. Despite his close ties to Trump, Musk did not participate in it. He later called Altman a fraud. Follow “Zamin” news on “Telegram”