Elon Musk wants to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion

Elon Musk has launched a $97.4 billion bid to take control of OpenAI. The Wall Street Journal reports a group of investors led by Musk’s xAI submitted an unsolicited offer to the company’s board of directors on Monday. The group wants to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI’s for-profit arm.

When asked for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed Engadget to an X post from CEO Sam Altman. “No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” Altman wrote on the social media platform Musk owns.

“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement his attorney shared with The Journal. “We will make sure that happens.”

It’s hard to say how serious this bid from Musk is and what — if any — chance it has to succeed. OpenAI is not a traditional company, and the nonprofit structure Sam Altman and others at the company want it to get away from may in fact protect it from Musk’s offer. Were OpenAI purely a for-profit company with traditional shares Musk’s bid would likely trigger what’s 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 to maximize shareholder profits.

Musk, as you can imagine, wasn’t a fan of Altman’s joke, writing “Swindler” in response and later calling him “Scam Altman.”

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