FILE-Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre on June 16, 2023 in Paris, France. (Photo by Che …
Elon Musk and a group of investors is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit behind OpenAI.
The Associated Press reported that Musk and his own AI startup, xAI, and other firms backing the bid, including Baron Capital Group, Valor Management, Atreides Management, Vy Fund, Emanuel Capital Management and Eight Partners VC want to take control of the ChatGPT maker and return it to its original goal as a nonprofit research lab, Musk's attorney Marc Toberoff told the news outlet.
Attorneys for OpenAI and Musk battled in a California federal court last week as a judge considered Musk's request for a court order that would block the ChatGPT maker from converting itself to a for-profit company.
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What they're saying:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rejected the bid on X, saying, "no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want."
Toberoff said in a statement obtained by the AP that if Altman and OpenAI’s current board "are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time."
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U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has not made a ruling on Musk's request and raised concerns regarding OpenAI and its relationship with business partner Microsoft and stating that she wouldn’t stop the case from moving to trial as soon as 2026 so a jury can decide, the AP reported.
The backstory:
Musk and Altman, who collaborated to start OpenAI in 2015 and later competed over who should lead it, have been in a feud over the startup's direction since Musk resigned from its board in 2018.
According to the AP, Musk sued the company in 2024, first in a California state court and later in federal court, claiming the organization betrayed its founding goals as a nonprofit research lab that would benefit the public good by safely building better-than-human AI. Musk invested $45 million in the startup from its founding until 2018.