Elon Musk leads $97 billion offer to buy OpenAI just a year after suing the company

An investment group led by Elon Musk has offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, a company Musk help found.

OpenAI was founded by Musk and entrepreneur Sam Altman as a nonprofit in 2015, but is now looking to transition to for-profit, which Musk opposes for cybersecurity reasons.

“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement on February 10, per Reuters.

Musk added, “We will make sure that happens.”

Musk sued OpenAI in February 2024 for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices. He complained that OpenAI had set its founding agreement “aflame.”

‘No thank you.’

The lawsuit stated that the company was founded to be a “non-profit developing [artificial general intelligence] for the benefit of humanity, not for a for-profit company seeking to maximize shareholder profits.”

The company was allegedly to be “open-source, balancing only countervailing safety considerations, and would not keep its technology closed and secret for proprietary commercial reasons,” the lawsuit also claimed.

Musk ended up withdrawing the lawsuit in June 2024.

In response to Musk’s bid, Altman publicly posted, “No thank you,” to the offer, before adding, “but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

OpenAI is behind the popular chatbot program ChatGPT, which allows users to ask the artificial intelligence complex questions or have it write content based on keywords and ideas.

Microsoft made a sizeable investment in OpenAI in 2023 to the tune of several billion, stating that the two companies share the same “values.”

Musk started his own competing AI company called xAI in 2023 and received a recent $6 billion injection from investors at a $40 billion valuation, according to Reuters. At the same time, OpenAI’s valuation is estimated to be $300 billion, according to PC Gamer.

The U.S. government plans on sinking a whopping $500 billion into the development of AI infrastructure, which Vice President JD Vance spoke about at a recent AI summit in Paris.

Vance declared American excellence in the space and told foreign representatives it would be financially unwise for them to develop AI alongside corrupt governments as opposed to the United States.

The vice president also made it clear that the United States would not work with any jurisdiction that seeks to use artificial intelligence to censor its citizens or attempts in any way to cordon off users who make statements that the government doesn’t approve of.

Vance added that the use of AI should empower the American worker, not replace him.

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