An investment group headed by Tesla founder Elon Musk offered to buy OpenAI, the company that created the now infamous ChatGPT. The offer, for $97.4 billion, came from Musk and his AI startup xAI as well as a group of investors.
Shortly after this offer was made, one of the other founders of OpenAI and current CEO, Sam Altman, took to X, an app owned by Musk, to publicly deny the offer. His statement read, “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
Musk has a long-standing relationship with OpenAI, having been one of the original investors in 2015. Musk departed the company in 2018 due to disagreements over leadership. Since then, tensions between him and Altman have been high, coming to a climax when Musk sued OpenAI in 2024.
In March of 2024, following Musk’s lawsuit, OpenAI released a statement on its website regarding the company’s relationship with Musk. The statement detailed Musk’s original involvement with the company, financial contributions and eventual exit. Musk allegedly desired to merge the company with Tesla or “have full control,” assuming the position of CEO while holding a majority stake in the company. When these demands were rejected, Musk allegedly withheld his funding and eventually left OpenAI in 2018. He stated in a leaked email that he believed the company’s probability of success to be zero.
Musk’s lawsuit accused OpenAI of “intentionally court[ing] and deceiv[ing]” him by allegedly enticing him with an idea of a non-profit that “would attract world-class scientists, conduct leading AI research and development” and then “flipped the narrative and proceeded to cash in,” by establishing the company as a for-profit. OpenAI’s responding statement alleges that Musk decided, alongside other OpenAI board members, to change the company to a for-profit in 2017.
The suit asked the judge to stop OpenAI from transitioning into a for-profit company. Although the judge found Musk’s claims of personal harm from OpenAI becoming for-profit to be a stretch, she didn’t block the case from going to trial, which is expected to happen sometime this year.
With the long-standing feud between Altman and Musk, the rejection of his bid to buy OpenAI isn’t surprising, but it may have interesting implications for the future of AI and the ongoing lawsuit.
