The beef between Elon Musk and OpenAI is pretty well documented, probably especially by the US courts. The former has gone from founding the latter to leaving it, followed by suing it and then dropping the suit. Which makes it a bit funny that the next step in their relationship is apparently for Musk to buy OpenAI, and the former has offered a pretty big sum of money to do so.
Or more specifically, as The Wall Street Journal reports, “a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering US$97.4 billion (~RM435 billion) to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI”. Which would probably be tricky for the company led by Sam Altman as it had previously announced its plans to transition its for-profit arm into a Public Benefit Corporation. This would give the for-profit half more control over the company and effectively making it the policy for the organisation as a whole.
no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 10, 2025
In a statement to the WSJ, Musk’s lawyer Marc Toberoff said that “it’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was”. In response, Sam Altman countered to buy X, previously Twitter, for 10% of what was offered instead.
On the surface, this looks like one more example of Elon Musk’s notoriously expensive trolling. Though reading deeper into the situation, some have claimed that complicating the for-profit transition for OpenAI – or more specifically, making it more expensive to do so – was exactly what Musk was after.
