• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 10, 2025

Elon Musk is leading a consortium of investors offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, co-founded the company, along with 10 others, in 2015. Now the two are in a legal complicated battle that could stop Altman’s plan to make OpenAI a for-profit company. The relationship between Musk and Altman goes back more than a decade.

OpenAI’s mission was to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. The company has since led the AI boom through ChatGPT and search, with investments from Microsoft.

Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018, citing conflicts of interest with his role at Tesla, but in 2023 built his own AI company called xAI. He claimed once OpenAI took money from Microsoft, OpenAI breached its founding statement. 

Marc Toberoff, Musk’s attorney, told The Wall Street Journal that he submitted a bid for all the nonprofit’s assets to OpenAI’s board of directors Monday.

Altman, who was still calling Musk’s platform Twitter, quickly responded to the offer X, "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

On January 7, Toberoff sent a letter to the Attorney General in California, OpenAI’s home base, and Delaware -- where it is incorporated -- asking to open bidding for the company to determine fair market value of its charitable assets.

There’s another major complication to Altman’s plans for OpenAI’s future. The company spent up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX.  

The bid is backed by Musk’s xAI, and could possibly merge with OpenAI following a deal, the WSJ reported. Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and 8VC, a venture firm led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, along with Ari Emanuel, CEO of Hollywood company Endeavor, are some of the backers to the investment fund.