On Monday, a group of investors led by Elon Musk made a $97.6 billion proposal to acquire OpenAI. Marc Toberoff, Musk’s attorney, provided The Wall Street Journal with confirmation of the story.
The unsolicited proposal is the most recent development in Musk’s conflict with co-founder Sam Altman, with whom he co-founded OpenAI in 2015 along with a host of other people. Musk and OpenAI are already involved in a court battle; in 2024, Musk filed an injunction to stop OpenAI’s attempt to renounce its nonprofit status. As was its original goal, the Musk-led team is framing the move as an attempt to refocus OpenAI on open-sourced AI.
Musk’s own AI firm xAI said
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk told The Journal, by way of Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.” is involved with the bid. This also leads to the belief that a successful investment could find the two companies joining.
The billionaire says
“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,” said Musk. “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.”
Altman wrote a cheeky X post earlier Monday in response to Musk’s offer, saying, “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” In 2022, Musk and investors famously paid $44 billion for Twitter.
