Would you stop using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and API if Elon Musk took it over?

There’s almost never a dull moment on the AI beat, and today was no exception: The Wall Street Journal this afternoon reported that a consortium of private investors led by the world’s wealthiest man, the multi-company owning Elon Musk, had presented a bid of $97.4 billion to OpenAI’s non-profit board of directors to acquire the for-profit subsidiary of the company led by former co-founder turned rival, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Putting aside the long and messy history between the two men, which has already resulted in several lawsuits, Musk’s stated goal of wanting to acquire another company atop the six he already owns or runs (SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, Neuralink, X, xAI) is to make OpenAI open source, per its original founding mission statement of delivering AI benefits and artificial general intelligence (AGI) for all.

“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by his attorney to the Journal. “We will make sure that happens.”

The takeover bid is also personal for Musk, who after co-founding and bankrolling the company in 2015 alongside Altman and 9 others, decided to exit the venture in 2018, only to turn into one of its biggest public critics and business rivals. He founded his own xAI startup in 2023 and is building a massive AI model training supercluster of graphics processing units (GPUs) in Memphis, Tennessee, known as Colossus.

Musk’s double-speak

Yet the bid to control OpenAI would seem to be a tacit admission. Despite all his rapid and hefty investment in spinning up a competitor — the rival Grok chatbot baked into social network X, and the underlying Grok-2 large multimodal model and application programming interface (API) for third party software developers — Musk is not succeeding at winning as many users as he and his collaborators might like.

It would also suggest that the Grok-3 model — reportedly in training, and which pseudonymous AI rumor accounts on X have hyped as industry-leading — is perhaps not as advanced or ready as the competition (namely, these days: DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI’s “o” series of models.”)

Altman himself took to Musk’s social network X to dismiss the idea of Musk acquiring OpenAI, writing: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” to which Musk responded with another post calling Altman “Scam Altman.”

While some journalists have suggested that Musk’s bid may have the effect of complicating OpenAI’s neat plans to spin off the for-profit arm from the non-profit holding company — for which the price was suggested to be less than $40 billion — the truth is that OpenAI’s last funding round valued it at $157 billion, so both prices are ultimately much lower than the current crop of investors have bought into the company for.

Not out of the question

Yet it’s hardly out of the question that Musk could succeed with this takeover bid. After all, his bid to take over Twitter (and ultimately change the name to X) was also deemed as a longshot by some in the press — until it happened for real, and arguably changed the course of history by promoting more posts from conservative and freewheeling influencers and paying subscribers over the verified journalists of yore, influencing the 2024 election and a myriad other global events and individual perceptions/worldviews.

Which also raises the question, especially in light of his controversial Nazi-like salute on Trump’s second inauguration day and general support for far-right politics globally: If Musk does succeed in taking over OpenAI, would you continue to use its products (ChatGPT, Sora, DALL-E 3, its APIs and various other models and services) or switch to another AI model provider? After all, a number of people and organizations left X for competing short social posting platforms BlueSky and Threads in the wake of Musk’s takeover and general moves to support Trump and far-right politicians.

I should also hasten to point out that while Musk has promoted viewpoints and political positions I personally find detestable, his Grok AI model has enabled a much more freewheeling and freeform expression than most other competing AI models, especially with regards to image generation — it’s how I created the likeness of Altman at the top of this post, for example. This is a laudable position in my eyes, and might indicate that a takeover of OpenAI would result in less censored/restricted models, which I support.

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