Consortium led by Elon Musk makes $97.4B bid to annex OpenAI

A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy OpenAI.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the news outlet that first reported the story, the bid was submitted to OpenAI’s Board of Directors. Later that day, Elon Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff confirmed that the consortium wants to gain full control of the company with its bid.

The consortium making the bid includes Musk’s AI company xAI and investment company Baron Capital Group. A deal could mean a merger between xAI and OpenAI.

As of this moment, it remains unclear how Musk intends to finance the acquisition. The entrepreneur could sell Tesla shares, or stake his company SpaceX as collateral.

Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, quickly responded to the consortium’s bid by saying “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want” on X. Musk purchased Twitter back in 2022 for $44 billion.

Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, which has been around since 2015. A few years later, in 2018, Musk decided to leave the Board of Directors, because he wasn’t happy how the company was being run.

Musk argued that he co-founded OpenAI for altruistic reasons. However, making a profit seemed more important. In June Musk decided to drop the lawsuit, just to revamp it in August.

According to the indictment, Altman and CTO Gregory Brockman “assiduously manipulated” Musk into co-founding OpenAI by promising the company would be safer and more transparent than other AI developing, profit-driven tech companies.

“Musk and the non-profit’s namesake objective were betrayed by Altman and his accomplices. The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions,” Musk claimed.

The Tesla and SpaceX owner demanded that OpenAI would fulfill its original non-profit mission. In addition, he wants the company to pay damages and exclude Microsoft from using GPT-4 models and next generation large language models (LLMs).