Elon Musk Wants To Buy OpenAI
Elon Musk and his group of investors have offered to buy OpenAI, which is the parent company of ChatGPT, for $97.4 billion.
Musk has a long dispute with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and has already filed a number of legal complaints against the company and Altman, claiming that the AI company and its leadership have misrepresented OpenAI as a philanthropy.
More than this Musk claims that OpenAI has broken with its founding charter by seeking to make a profit with its AI tools.
OpenAI is controlled by a nonprofit organization that controls an entity called OpenAI LP which is a for-profit company that exists within the larger company’s structure. That for-profit company took OpenAI from worthless to a valuation of around $100 billion in just a few years and Altman is largely credited as the mastermind of that plan and is considered the key person behind the company’s success.
Also Read: What Is DeepSeek And Why Everyone Is Talking About It?
Sam Altman’s Response To Elon Musk’s Offer
“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, an attorney representing the investors, in a statement. “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.”
In response, Sam Altman said in a post on X, “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, left the company following a dispute related to the company’s shift to for-profit work. OpenAI was founded because its creators believed that artificial intelligence, or AGI, posed a serious threat to humanity.
Elon Musk first sued OpenAI in June 2024, but he quickly dropped that initial lawsuit after the company published a blog post that included several of Musk’s emails from OpenAI’s early days.
The emails showed Musk acknowledging the need for the company to make large sums of money to fund the computing resources needed to power up its AI ambitions, which stood in contrast to the claims in his lawsuit that the company was wrongly making a profit.
Following this Musk again filed a new lawsuit in August 2024 where he accused the following company of racing to develop powerful “Artificial General Intelligence” technology to maximize their profits. More than this Musk also accused the company of engaging in racketeering.
On the other hand, OpenAI, accused Musk of essentially being jealous because he was no longer involved in the startup after he left the company in 2018 following an unsuccessful bid to convince his fellow co-founders to let Tesla acquire it.
Follow Techsgyaan to get more such AI-related content.
