IBL News | New York
A group of investors led by Elon Musk made an unsolicited offer of $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI in an audacious attack against Sam Altman and his plans to convert his company to a for-profit company and spend up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate.
The consortium of investors, which included Vy Capital and xAI, Musk’s AI company (which could merge with OpenAI), submitted this bid for all the nonprofit’s assets to OpenAI’s Board of Directors yesterday.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement by his lawyer, Marc Toberoff.
OpenAI’s Board of Directors, closely allied with Sam Altman, rejected and mocked Musk’s bid. “No, thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” Mr. Altman said on X.
In a Slack message to employees, he wrote, “Our structure ensures that no individual can take control of OpenAI. These are tactics to try and weaken us because we are making great progress.”
Altman and Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit charity. In 2019, after Musk left the company and Altman became chief executive, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary that has served as a vehicle for it to raise money from Microsoft and other investors.
Now, Altman is willing to turn the subsidiary into a traditional company and spin out the nonprofit, which would own equity in the new for-profit.
Musk has filed a series of legal complaints accusing OpenAI of betraying its original nonprofit mission by creating a for-profit arm and colluding with its largest investor, Microsoft, to dominate the development of AI.
The day President Trump was inaugurated, Altman announced a plan called Stargate to invest up to $500 billion over the next four years in U.S. data centers.
Currently, OpenAI is locked in negotiations with Microsoft and other stakeholders over how much equity they should receive in the new company.
