Elon Musk-led investor group makes $97.4 billion bid for control of OpenAI

Unsolicited offer complicates Sam Altman's plans to convert OpenAI to a for-profit company

- Jessica Toonkel & Berber Jin

A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, raising the stakes in his battle with Sam Altman over the company behind ChatGPT.

Musk's lawyer, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted a bid for all the nonprofit's assets to OpenAI's board of directors Monday.

The unsolicited offer adds a complication to Altman's carefully laid plans for OpenAI's future, including converting it to a for-profit company and spending up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate. He and Musk are already fighting in court over the direction of OpenAI.

"It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was," Musk said in a statement provided by Toberoff. "We will make sure that happens."

Altman quickly rejected the offer on X. He wrote, "No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want," using the previous name for the Musk-owned social-media platform and moving the decimal point in the billionaire's bid for OpenAI one space to the left.

In a Slack message to employees, Altman 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."