A group of investors led by Tesla Chief Elon Musk has offered to buy the non-profit arm of OpenAI for $97.4 billion dollar, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The bid has added fire to the already livid rivalry between OpenAI and Musk, with the latter already suing the company for moving away from its open-source non-profit mission and undermining fair competition.
The offer by submitted by Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff to the OpenAI board of directors on Monday. After the bid, Musk said, “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,”.
Musk’s bid for OpenAI is being backed by his company xAI which could be merged with OpenAI should the deal go through. Apart from that, Musk’s external investors include Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and 8VC, Hollywood company CEO Ari Emanuel and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
Meanwhile, the offer by Musk saw a very public rebuke by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on X (the social media platform owned by Musk and previously called Twitter). Altman wrote, “No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
“Our structure ensures that no individual can take control of OpenAI…These are tactics to try and weaken us because we are making great progress.” Altman told his employees via an internal Slack message.
OpenAI vs Elon Musk:
Notably, OpenAI was started in 2015 as a non-profit by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others in a bid to rival the competition posed by Google’s AI. Later on, though Musk left the company owing to disagreements with AI startup and Altman took over as the CEO.
In 2019, OpenAI created a for profit entity that would allow it to take investmenents from companies like Microsoft. The ChatGPT maker is now working on turning into a full on profit structure with the non-profit having a stake in the new entity.
Musk has also filed a series of lawsuits against OpenAI in the recent years and amened late last year to include Microsoft in the reckoning. The Tesla chief claims that OpenAI and Microsoft are actively trying to “monopolize the generative AI market,” by extracting promises from investors to not fund the competing artificial intelligence companies like xAI.
