Elon Musk-Led Group Submits $97.6 Billion Bid to Buy OpenAI, Sam Altman Declines: ‘No Thank You’

The offer brings together a powerful coalition of backers, including Musk’s own AI company xAI and venture heavyweights like Valor Equity Partners, Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s venture firm 8VC. This bid comes at a pivotal moment for OpenAI. CEO Sam Altman is already juggling multiple massive deals: converting the company to a for-profit structure, raising $40 billion at a $340 billion valuation, and launching a $500 billion AI infrastructure project. For Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 before departing in 2019, this bid represents his boldest move yet to challenge what he sees as the company’s betrayal of its original mission to develop AI safely and openly (an allegation he’s presently suing OpenAI for).

A team of investors led by Elon Musk submitted a $97.6 billion bid to purchase OpenAI on Monday. The unsolicited bid is the latest escalation by Musk in his war with co-founder Sam Altman, with whom he co-founded OpenAI with numerous other individuals back in 2015. Musk is already embroiled in a legal dispute with OpenAI, filing a 2024 injunction against its effort to transition away from its nonprofit status. The Musk-led team is positioning the move as a bid to refocus OpenAI on open sourced AI, as was its initial aim. “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk told The Journal, by way of Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.” Musk’s own AI firm, xAI, is involved with the bid, leading to speculation that a successful acquisition could find the two companies merging.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Elon Musk is "probably just trying to slow us down" with his bid to purchase the company, insisting on Tuesday that it is not for sale. Altman, who spoke to Bloomberg on the sidelines of the AI Action Summit in Paris following Musk’s unsolicited bid of $97.4 billion to take over OpenAI, also said that Musk is probably living his whole life "from a position of insecurity" and that "I don’t think he’s like a happy person, I do feel for him. Look, OpenAI is not for sale," Altman told Bloomberg. "Elon tries all sorts of things for a long time. This is this week’s episode. I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor. He’s working hard to raise a lot of money for [his startup] xAI and they are trying to compete with us from a technological perspective from getting the product into the market and I wish he would just compete by building a better product but I think there has been a lot of tactics, you know many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff and now this," Altman added. "And we’ll try to just put our head down and keep working."