OpenAI dismisses Musk’s $100B bid to acquire the company

OpenAI’s board of directors has rejected a $97.4 billion takeover bid that was recently presented by a consortium led by Elon Musk.

“OpenAI is not for sale, and the board has unanimously rejected Mr. Musk’s latest attempt to disrupt his competition. Any potential reorganization of OpenAI will strengthen our nonprofit and its mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity,” Bret Taylor, Chairman of OpenAI’s board of directors, says in a statement on X.

According to Reuters, Musk’s lawyers said that the consortium would withdraw its bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit arm if it drops its goal of becoming a for-profit entity.

Last week, a consortium of companies led by Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk offered to pay $97.4 billion to acquire OpenAI’s nonprofit arm. 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 Musk’s social media platform X.

Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, which has been around since 2015. However, the billionaire decided to leave the company, because he thought OpenAI was more interested in ‘enriching the board’ than strengthening its nonprofit mission to ensure artificial general intelligence (AGI) would benefit all of humanity.

To make the company lose its for-profit structure, Musk launched a lawsuit against OpenAI. In June 2024, the entrepreneur decided to drop the lawsuit, just to revive it again in August. Musk demanded that OpenAI would fulfil its original nonprofit mission, and to exclude Microsoft from using GPT-4 models and next generation large language models (LLMs).

In November, Musk asked a federal court for a preliminary injunction to block OpenAI from moving to a for-profit structure.

In late 2024, OpenAI shared plans to restructure the company into a for-profit company, including a nonprofit arm by 2025. In order to achieve this, Altman intends to promote its for-profit activities more predominantly to make it easier to collect more money, to Musk’s dismay.