Heading up a consortium of investors, American billionaire Elon Musk has offered $97.4 billion to purchase OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, according to media reports.
The investor consortium reportedly includes Vy Capital, xAI—Musk’s AI company—Hollywood power broker Ari Emanuel, and other backers.
The move may escalate a long-standing, deeply personal battle between Musk and OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, over the future of artificial intelligence.
“No thank you,” Altman wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
Musk responded with a curt, “Swindler.”
OpenAI has not yet reviewed the bid given the CEOs’ public spat, according to a source familiar with the company’s stance. Musk’s offer could complicate OpenAI’s ongoing efforts to secure a $40 billion funding round, which the company expects to nearly double its valuation from just four months ago.
The new funding round, led by SoftBank, values OpenAI at $300 billion, making it one of the most valuable private companies globally—along with SpaceX and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
Musk, Altman, and several other tech entrepreneurs and researchers co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit with a vision of openly sharing AI advancements. However, Musk left in 2018 following a power struggle, and soon after that Altman restructured OpenAI into a for-profit entity, enabling the company to raise the massive capital needed for AI development.
Despite the change in legal structure, the nonprofit board remains in legal control of OpenAI, an unusual form of governance that led to Altman’s brief ousting in late 2023. The board claimed at the time that it no longer trusted him to develop AI in the best interest of humanity. However, it reversed the decision five days later, and Altman returned, strengthening his control by appointing allied board members.