Elon Musk offered $97.4 billion to buy OpenAI

A group of investors led by Elon Musk has made a $97.4 billion bid to acquire the assets of the nonprofit organization that controls OpenAI. This escalates the ongoing battle between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the future of artificial intelligence.

This was reported by the New York Times.

The consortium includes Vy Capital, Xai (Musk's AI company), as well as influential Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel and other investors.

However, the chances of success are slim — OpenAI's board is closely connected to Altman, and he has already reacted to the offer with a joke on X.

"No, thanks, but we're ready to buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want," Altman replied.

OpenAI on the way to record funding

Musk's proposal complicates the process of attracting $40 billion in investment from SoftBank, which could raise the value of OpenAI to $300 billion. This would make the company one of the most expensive private companies in the world, along with SpaceX and ByteDance.

After his return to OpenAI in 2023, Altman is actively working to separate the company from the nonprofit's control. However, in order to do so, OpenAI will have to compensate the board that controls the assets.

Why Musk is ready to pay billions for OpenAI

Although the nonprofit OpenAI has only two employees and $22 million in assets, it legally controls OpenAI. That's why Musk and his partners want to buy it out to influence the company's future.

By law, the board is required to sell assets at fair market value. Musk's offer now sets a new high bar, and OpenAI will have to justify to regulators if it decides to buy back its assets for less.

As a reminder, OpenAI accused China's DeepSeek of using its technology to train its model. At the same time, netizens point out that the American company has repeatedly faced claims of copyright infringement.

We also wrote that OpenAI has introduced a new feature for ChatGPT called Deep Research. It allows artificial intelligence to work autonomously, planning and executing multi-stage research.