The battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman continues, with the news that the Tesla CEO has led a bid to buy the maker of ChatGPT.
On Monday, a consortium of Musk-led investors submitted a $97.4 billion bid to acquire OpenAI, one of the leading AI platforms.
OpenAI has been transitioning away from its initial non-profit structure, which Musk co-founded with Altman in 2015 before departing in 2019. Musk has been publicly critical of Altman’s attempts to leave behind the company’s non-profit origin.
“OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” Musk posted on X on in 2023.
“Not what I intended at all,” he said.
Some interpret Musk’s bid as a way to interfere with Altman’s plan to go for-profit.
“If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI, Inc. board of directors are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time,” said Marc Toberoff, the attorney representing the investors.
In 2024, Musk sued OpenAI over its restructuring plans. He later rescinded the suit but again refiled it.
Musk is joined in the bid to acquire the ChatGPT by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and the CEO of the entertainment company Endeavor, Ari Emanuel.
“At x.AI, we live by the values I was promised OpenAI would follow. We’ve made Grok open source, and we respect the rights of content creators,” Musk said in a statement, referring to the artificial intelligence arm of his social media platform, X, per The Guardian.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens.”
Last month, The Dallas Express reported that the White House, under the new Trump administration, announced a massive AI infrastructure initiative named the Stargate Project, with OpenAI named as one of the companies involved in the project.
The half-a-trillion-dollar private investment aims to boost domestic AI research in the United States. Texas was selected as one of the first eight states to see investment related to the project.