Tech billionaire Elon Musk and a consortium of investors have offered a whopping $97.4 billion for the acquisition of OpenAI, claiming they want to restore the AI company to its basic mission of developing technology for the benefit of humanity.
The offer, which was presented to the company’s board of directors on Monday, quickly spread in the US as Musk proposed to counter OpenAI’s transition toward a for-profit model.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said, according to a statement from his attorney, Marc Toberoff.
While rejecting the offer, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mocked Musk and asked if he could buy X for the same amount. In response, Musk called Altman a “swindler” and referred to him as “Scam Altman.”
Musk helped co-found OpenAI in 2015, investing approximately $45 million, but left the board in 2018 due to strategic disagreements with Altman.
Since then, he has been a vocal critic of OpenAI’s direction, particularly its commercialisation efforts and close partnership with Microsoft.
In March 2024, Musk sued the company for allegedly straying from its founding principles by prioritising profit over its mission to serve humanity.
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Musk’s attorney said on Monday that if Altman and OpenAI’s board “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.”
Meanwhile, not only insiders, but also the open AI, is facing growing competition from Chinese AI firms such as DeepSeek which was unveiled in January 2025.
DeepSeek-R1, according to AI experts, matches or surpasses OpenAI’s models in areas such as mathematical reasoning and code generation.
Musk has been developing his own AI company, xAI, which launched in 2023. He introduced Grok, a chatbot integrated into X and designed to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Musk has often positioned xAI as a challenger to OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, focusing on building AI systems that prioritise truth and transparency.
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