As OpenAI attempts to become a for-profit venture, Elon Musk appears to be a throwing a wrench into the works.
A report from The Wall Street Journal revealed today that Musk, alongside a number of investors, is offering nearly $100 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI. The investor group includes Ari Emanuel and Musk's own artificial intelligence company, xAI.
At the time of writing, OpenAI has not officially released a statement about the bid. However, OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, did post on Twitter, "No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want."
Musk, apparently, unamused, responded, "Swindler." He has continued making anti-Altman posts on Twitter including a video where he wrote "Scam Altman."
This is the latest development in the ongoing feud between two of tech's biggest AI supporters in the United States.
The bid was said to have been submitted to the OpenAI board of directors by Marc Toberoff, a lawyer who is also leading a lawsuit instigated by Musk against OpenAI last year.
The move also comes as OpenAI is in the midst of another fund-raising push as part of project Stargate, a Trump-backed plan to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States. It shares the same name as a project introduced last year by OpenAI and Microsoft.
At the same time, Altman has been in the process of turning OpenAI from a nonprofit venture into a for-profit company. It's unclear if Musk's bid alters those plans as some valuations have the company set at $157 billion.
An ongoing feud
This feud goes as far back as 2015. OpenAI was founded by Altman, Musk and several others that year.
Publically, the feuding seemed to begin in 2018 when Musk left OpenAI's board of directors. It was initially described as a conflict of interest removal. However, later reporting seemed to reveal a more contentious ousting as Musk apparently attempted to take on chief executive role and merge OpenAI with Tesla.
Five years later in 2023, Musk launched xAI which quickly released the AI chatbot Grok that was described as an anti-"woke" response to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Last year, things ramped up in March when Musk first launched his lawsuit claiming that Altman had violated the company's principles. That lawsuit continued in November with a preliminary injunction to OpenAI from becoming for-profit.
The announcement of Stargate during the first week of the second Trump administration induced a childish war of words on Twitter between Musk and Altman with Musk claiming OpenAI"s main backer, SoftBank, didn't have the money. A brief tit-for-tat ensued from there. Musk called Stargate "fake" and questioned Altman's loyalty to Trump.
Now, we have this $97.4 billion unsolicited bid and mocking words from Altman.
What happens next?
While both men are billionaires, Elon Musk is quite possibly the richest person on Earth with estimated worth of $392 billion. Altman, by comparison, is worth $1.2 billion, largely thanks to investments in Reddit and Stripe. Allegedly, he does not have equity stake in OpenAI.
They both also seem to have President Trump's ear, with Musk running amok through the government with his DOGE plan and Altman's support of the Stargate program which includes building data centers throughout the United States — something that the administration isn't actually paying for and was already in progress before Trump was sworn in.
The feud appears no closer to ending or coming to an amicable end.
More from Tom's Guide
- OpenAI introduces new features for WhatsApp users — here’s what’s new
- OpenAI’s ‘o3-mini’ is free for all users — what you need to know
- It doesn't matter if DeepSeek copied OpenAI — the damage has already been done in the AI arms race
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