A Wall Street Journal report says a group of investors led by X owner Elon Musk has made an offer to buy the non-profit organization that controls OpenAI for $97.4 billion. Musk said in a statement that the offer was made in order to return OpenAI "to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was," adding, "We will make sure that happens," but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seems determined to ensure it doesn't happen.
The offer to purchase OpenAI is the latest twist in a dispute that goes back almost a full year: Musk sued OpenAI in March, claiming the company had abandoned "its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity" in exchange for the pursuit of profit. OpenAI was founded as a non-profit but set up a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 after Musk's departure, and the money has been flowing free and fast ever since.
That all sounds noble and altruistic, but in December 2024 OpenAI released a statement saying Musk had pushed a for-profit structure for OpenAI in 2017, prior to his departure, and had demanded majority equity in and the role of CEO of the for-profit division. OpenAI ultimately rejected the offer, telling Musk it worried that "as the company makes genuine progress towards AGI, you will choose to retain your absolute control of the company despite current intent to the contrary." Musk then proposed a deal between OpenAI and Tesla in order to facilitate fundraising; shortly after that offer was rejected, Musk resigned. In 2023 he founded his own competing AI venture, xAI.
The whole thing brings to mind Musk's infamous Twitter fiasco of 2022, when the world's richest man made an off-the-cuff offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion and then did his best to get out of it before months of legal wrangling arm-twisted him into closing the deal. But the big difference in the OpenAI offer is that it's not just social media dick-swinging that's spiralled out of control. The WSJ says the proposal is backed by several big-money investors, and that means two things: It's a serious offer, and it (maybe) won't be derailed by Musk's erratic behavior.
It's hard to say how this all might work out. $97.4 billion is an awful lot of money, but a recent funding round put OpenAI's valuation at $300 billion, and the company is also leading a joint venture called Stargate that will see the US government sink $500 billion into the development of AI infrastructure. Numbers basically have no meaning at that point, except to the extent that a sub-$100 billion offer may not be enough to get the job done, particularly given Musk's handling of Twitter, now called X, which has struggled badly under his tenure.
If the deal does eventually go through, it would presumably leave Musk with a significant and possibly controlling interest in OpenAi; how that would impact OpenAI—whether it might be merged with xAI, somehow intertwined with Tesla and/or SpaceX, or just left to be mauled by DeepSeek—is anyone's guess.
Whatever the future holds, it already looks like personal beef will be a big and entertaining part of it. Altman alluded to X's financial troubles and post-Musk value plunge in his response to the offer, writing, "No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want." In a one-word response, Musk called Altman a "swindler." He later posted a brief video clip of Altman testifying before the US senate, calling him "Scam Altman."
