Elon Musk is leading a group of investors offering $97.4 billion to buy OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in a high-stakes move that could change the future of artificial intelligence.
Musk has had a long-standing disagreement with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and has filed several legal complaints against the company. He argues that OpenAI, which was originally meant to be a nonprofit, is now trying to make money from its AI technology, which goes against its founding goals.
OpenAI is run by a nonprofit organization, but it also owns a for-profit company called OpenAI LP. This for-profit branch helped grow OpenAI from being worth almost nothing to being valued at about $100 billion in just a few years. Sam Altman is mostly credited with making this happen.
Musk’s investment, reported by the Wall Street Journal, could give him control of OpenAI, which competes with his own AI company, X.AI.
Marc Toberoff, an attorney representing the investors, said, “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, in a statement to CNN.
In response, Sam Altman posted on X, “no thank you, but we’ll buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but he left the company after disagreements about its move toward profit-making.
no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 10, 2025
The founders of OpenAI started the company because they were worried that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could be dangerous for humanity. They created a board to review the company’s products, and the code for those products was made public.
However, with big investors like Microsoft and Thrive Capital, OpenAI has pressure to grow its business and make money. Investors expect a good return on their money and don’t usually want to wait long.
This pressure may have pushed Altman to speed up the development of new products, which sometimes didn’t work perfectly at first. This can be a problem, especially with technology that is so good at copying human speech and actions that it can trick people into thinking fake conversations or images are real.
Read More: Bill Gates Once Issued a Warning to the World About Elon Musk
In late 2023, there was a strange boardroom fight where OpenAI’s board fired Altman but quickly brought him back. Afterward, the board was reorganized, and some former directors said they were worried OpenAI was moving too fast without thinking about safety.
Musk first sued OpenAI in June 2024, but he dropped the lawsuit after the company published some of his old emails from when he helped start OpenAI. The emails seemed to show Musk agreeing that the company needed to make a lot of money to support its AI work, which didn’t match what he had said in his lawsuit about OpenAI chasing profits.
Musk filed a new lawsuit in August 2024, accusing OpenAI of rushing to create powerful AGI to make money. He also accused the company of racketeering.
OpenAI responded, saying Musk was upset that he was no longer part of the company, especially after his attempt to convince his co-founders to let Tesla buy OpenAI in 2018 didn’t succeed.
Read More: Is the Future of Humanity in Elon Musk’s Hands?