Elon Musk Just Offered To Buy Openai For $97.4 Billion

In a melodramatic escalation of Silicon Valley’s astir heated AI rivalry, Elon Musk conscionable announced that he’s starring a $97.4 cardinal bid to bargain OpenAI’s nonprofit arm, according to The Wall Street Journal. The bid was reportedly delivered to nan committee Monday morning.

The relationship brings together a powerful conjugation of backers, including Musk’s ain AI institution xAI and task heavyweights for illustration Valor Equity Partners, Hollywood mogul Ari Emanuel, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s task diligent 8VC.

This bid comes astatine a pivotal infinitesimal for OpenAI. CEO Sam Altman is already juggling aggregate monolithic deals: converting nan institution to a for-profit structure, raising $40 cardinal astatine a $340 cardinal valuation, and launching a $500 cardinal AI infrastructure project. For Musk, who co-founded OpenAI pinch Altman successful 2015 earlier departing successful 2019, this bid represents his boldest move yet to business what he sees arsenic nan company’s betrayal of its original ngo to create AI safely and openly (an allegation he’s presently suing OpenAI for).

“It’s clip for OpenAI to return to nan open-source, safety-focused portion for bully it erstwhile was,” Musk said successful a relationship provided by his lawyer Marc Toberoff to The Wall Street Journal. “We will make judge that happens.”

The bid too adds a important furnishings of complexity to OpenAI’s planned for-profit conversion, arsenic Musk’s squad has promised to lucifer aliases transcend immoderate higher offers. This creates a thorny business for Altman, who’s already navigating negotiations pinch Microsoft and different stakeholders complete equity successful nan planned for-profit structure.

Shortly aft nan news was announced, Altman posted connected X: “no convey you but we will bargain twitter for $9.74 cardinal if you want.”

OpenAI pointed to Altman’s position erstwhile asked for comment. Toberoff did not instantly respond to a petition for comment.