Elon Musk's $97.4B bid for openAI rejected, Altman's bold counter
Elon Musk, along with a group of investors, has submitted a bid to purchase OpenAI for $97.4 billion. The company's co-founder, Sam Altman, who has differences with Musk, rejected the proposal. However, he made Musk a surprising offer in return.
The bid was reported by "The Wall Street Journal" through Marc Toberoff, a lawyer representing Musk and allied investors from Silicon Valley.
"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," Musk said in a published statement.
The offer amounts to $97.4 billion and involves the acquisition of the non-profit foundation OpenAI, which formally controls the company behind ChatGPT.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rejected the offer in a post on the X platform.
"No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want," he wrote.
Altman and Musk: Once partners, now adversaries
Altman and Musk, who were among the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015, have been in conflict for many years. Last year, Musk sued his former partner, accusing him of betraying the organization's mission, which was based on non-profit principles, open source, and safe AI development. The South African-born billionaire also founded his own company developing artificial intelligence, xAI, which is one of the consortium members attempting to acquire OpenAI.
The largest investor in OpenAI to date is Microsoft. As noted by "WSJ," Musk's bid complicates Altman's plans for the future of his organization, including transforming it entirely into a regular enterprise and planning to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure as part of the "Stargate" project.
Right after Altman announced the initiative at the White House, Musk stated that Altman does not have the promised funds.
