A group of investors led by Elon Musk plans to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The offer comes at a key time for the startup, which recently announced plans to turn into a commercial company has targeted a valuation of $300 billion and plans to post revenues of $11.6 billion this year; and OpenAI is a key participant in the Stargate project presented personally by President Trump, which envisages investments of $500 billion to build data centers for artificial intelligence across the United States.
Elon Musk and OpenAI have a long history of conflicts that began when the startup was founded. The billionaire was one of the first investors in the company, but in 2018 he left because the offer to merge OpenAI with Tesla under his leadership did not find a response from the co-founders. Subsequently, he regularly criticized the startup for not adhering to its original goal (developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity) and focusing on making money, and also filed a number of lawsuits against OpenAI
He dropped the first lawsuit, filed in June 2024, after the Altman-led startup released old correspondence with the billionaire in which Musk acknowledges the company’s need to make large sums of money to fund computing resources. The second lawsuit, dated August 2024, already accused OpenAI of developing a powerful technology «artificial general intelligence» to «maximize profits».
Instead, OpenAI spoke of jealousy on the part of Musk, who simply did not see the startup’s potential. At the time of ChatGPT’s launch, the billionaire joined the list of people who signed a letter about suspension of the development of artificial intelligence technologies for six months, whereas was secretly creating xAI at the same time.
The large-scale investment could give Musk control over OpenAI, which competes with his own artificial intelligence startup.
«If Altman and the current OpenAI board of directors intend to become a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the organization is fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control of the most transformative technology of our time,» said Mark Toberoff, an attorney representing investors. «It’s time for OpenAI to return to the security-focused open source system it once was. We will make sure it does».
Altman immediately responded to Musk’s request to acquire OpenAI and wrote on X (formerly Twitter):
«No, thank you. But we can buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want».
We remind you that two years ago Elon Musk bought Twitter for a whopping $40 billion. However, problems with moderation, the billionaire’s own controversial statements, and the eventual withdrawal of advertisers caused the company’s value to plummet. In September, Fidelity, which invested $19.6 million in the social network, reported that The value of its investments has decreased by almost 79% since 2022.
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