Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI – the maker of ChatGPT – has rebuffed a $97.4bn (£78.4bn) take over bid from a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk.
Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, confirmed he submitted the bid for all OpenAI’s assets to its board on Monday.
The offer is the latest twist in a longstanding battle between Musk, the world’s richest person and right-hand man to US President Donald Trump, and Open AI chief executive Sam Altman over the future of the start-up at the centre of the AI boom.
In response to the bid, Altman posted on Musk’s social media platform X: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want”.
Unlike many tech giants, such as Meta or Microsoft, OpenAI is not a publicly traded company.
Instead it has a complicated structure with involves a partnership between a nonprofit and for-profit arms.
Musk, who along with Altman, co-founded the organisation in 2015, says he wants to return it to its non-profit roots and original mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity.
However Musk also owns a rival firm, xAI.
Christie Pitts, a tech investor in new businesses at Panasonic Well in San Francisco, told the BBC she was sceptical about Musk’s motives.
“I think it’s fair to be pretty suspicious of this considering that he has a competitor himself… which is structured as a for-profit company, so I think there’s more than meets the eye here,” she said.
Altman has suggested something similar telling Axios Musk was “a competitor who is not able to beat us in the market and you know, instead is just trying to say, like, ‘I’m gonna buy this’ with total disregard for the mission”.
Altman is chief executive of OpenAI and sits on the board of the nonprofit.
He said in May last year that he does not own any stock in the organisation.
Altman wants to transform the organisation into a fully for-profit company, which he says will allow it to raise more money to put into AI research.
However, the decision over OpenAI’s future is not Altman’s alone – the board will have a say on the company’s future and may favour a sale, especially if the offer is increased.
The offer tabled at $97.4bn is much lower than the $157bn OpenAI was valued at in its latest funding round in October last year. Talks over a further funding round reportedly value it now at $300bn.
In a statement, Mr Toberoff said the consortium would be “prepared to consider matching or exceeding” any potential higher bid.
“As the co-founder of OpenAI and the most innovative and successful tech industry leader in history, Musk is the person best positioned to protect and grow OpenAI’s technology,” Musk’s attorney added on his behalf and other investors.
The creator of ChatGPT is also teaming up with another US tech giant, Oracle, along with a Japanese investment firm and an Emirati sovereign wealth fund to build $500bn of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US.
The new company, called The Stargate Project, was announced at the White House by President Donald Trump who billed it “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history” and said it would help keep “the future of technology” in the US.
Musk, despite being a top advisor to Trump, has claimed the venture does not “actually have the money” it has pledged to invest, though he has also not provided any details or substantiation for the comments.
