Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
- Sam Altman rejected Elon Musk's $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI.
- Altman suggested Musk's offer aimed to hinder competition and catch up with xAI.
- Musk is suing OpenAI, alleging it prioritizes profit over public good.
WASHINGTON — OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was quick with a quippy shutdown to Elon Musk's unsolicited bid Monday to buy the company behind ChatGPT for $97.4 billion.
"No thank you," Altman posted on X. "But we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want."
Musk himself is among the co-founders of artificial intelligence technology developer OpenAI, which launched in 2015 as a nonprofit but modified its business model in 2019 to become a "capped profit company," a designation it describes as a hybrid of the nonprofit and for-profit models.
OpenAI leaders are currently working to migrate the company to for-profit status. Musk parted ways with company leadership in 2018 when he resigned from the OpenAI board, but continued his investment activity until 2020. Musk has reported his total investment in OpenAI as $45 million but has since formed his own artificial intelligence innovation startup, xAI.
In comments to CNBC at an AI event on Tuesday, Altman characterized Musk's offer as a move to "slow down a competitor." When asked how seriously he's taking the offer, he responded, "Not particularly."
"I think it's to slow down a competitor and catch up with his thing, but I don't really know ... to the degree anybody does," Altman added, in response to another reporter's questions on the sidelines of the AI Action Summit in Paris, according to CNBC.
First reported by The Wall Street Journal, a consortium of investors led by Musk made a $97.4 billion offer Monday to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, a move many see as an extension of the acrimony between Musk and Altman.
At a January White House event, President Donald Trump stood with Altman, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to announce the $500 billion Stargate Project, a privately funded effort aiming to build out AI infrastructure assets in the U.S.
Hours after the press event, Musk took to his own social media platform to critique the Stargate plan, alleging in a response to a posting on X from OpenAI that the project participants "don't actually have the money" to fund the plans. In a follow-up post, Musk wrote that "SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority."
Musk reportedly contributed some $250 million to Trump's reelection effort and has become a member of the president's inner circle following his appointment as head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
Altman added his own response to Musk's criticism the following day, discounting the claim about adequate financial resources and inviting Musk to visit the site of a data center construction project near Abilene, Texas, the first in a network of massive processing facilities proposed in the Stargate plan.
Why is Musk suing OpenAI?
Last March, Musk filed a lawsuit claiming OpenAI, a global leader in artificial intelligence innovation which has developed the ChatGPT chatbot, DALL-E image generator and other advanced AI-driven tools, breached promises made in its founding documents and prioritizes profit motive over serving the public good.
Musk, the sole plaintiff in the case, named Altman and others as defendants in a suit that alleges the company is "irrevocably dedicated" to developing technology that "will benefit the public, and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person."
Musk's suit points to an early agreement among the OpenAI founders, which includes Musk, Altman and Greg Brockman, who is also a named defendant in the lawsuit, that the new endeavor "would be a nonprofit developing (artificial general intelligence) for the benefit of humanity, not for a for-profit company seeking to maximize shareholder profits; and ... would be open-source, balancing only countervailing safety considerations, and would not keep its technology closed and secret for proprietary commercial reasons."
But Musk says Altman, Brockman and OpenAI set that founding agreement "aflame" in 2023 when they launched the latest iteration of its AI-driven chatbot, ChatGPT-4, in March 2023. Musk claims that while previous work done on the ChatGPT platform was performed in an open and transparent manner, the coding and data training behind GPT-4 was kept concealed from everyone except OpenAI's funding partner, Microsoft.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said it was a "stretch" for Musk to claim he will be irreparably harmed if she doesn't intervene to stop OpenAI from moving forward with its transition from a nonprofit research laboratory to a for-profit corporation, according to an Associated Press report.
But the judge also raised concerns about OpenAI and its relationship with business partner Microsoft and said she wouldn't stop the case from moving to trial as soon as next year so a jury can decide.
"It is plausible that what Mr. Musk is saying is true. We'll find out. He'll sit on the stand," she said.
OpenAI has said Musk's requested court order would "debilitate OpenAI's business" and mission to the advantage of Musk and his own AI company, xAI, and is based on "far-fetched" legal claims.
