Elon Musk has offered $97.4 billion for control of OpenAI. The Wall Street Journal reports that a group of investors led by Musk’s xAI submitted an unsolicited proposal to the company’s board of directors on Monday. The group wants to buy the non-profit organization that controls the commercial division of OpenAI.
When asked to comment on the situation, a representative of OpenAI pointed Engadget to a post with an “X” from CEO Sam Altman. “No thanks, but we’ll buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” Altman wrote on the social network owned by Elon Musk.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the security-focused open source it once was,” Musk said in a statement his lawyer provided to The Journal. “We will make sure that happens.”
It’s hard to say how serious Musk’s proposal is and what, if any, chances it has of succeeding. OpenAI is not a traditional company, and the nonprofit structure from which Sam Altman and other company employees want to separate it may actually protect it from Musk’s offer. If OpenAI were a purely for-profit company with traditional stock, Musk’s offer would likely trigger what is known in corporate law as a “Revlon moment,” where under certain circumstances the company’s board of directors would be forced to sell the company to the highest bidder in order to maximize shareholder value.
Musk, as you can imagine, was not a fan of Altman’s joke, writing back “Fraud” and later calling him “Scammer Altman.”
