Elon Musk’s group makes $97.4 Billion bid for OpenAI. CEO refuses, and offers to “buy Twitter at $9.74 Billion”

What just happened? Elon Musk led a group of investors to make an unsolicited $97,4 billion bid for OpenAI. Musk’s battle with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is at a new level. Altman’s company is in a legal fight against Musk over its transition to non-profit status. Altman declined the bid and offered to “buy twitter for $9.74 billion.” Musk with “Swindler.”

Musk made the $97.4-billion offer to buy OpenAI’s nonprofit. Wall Street JournalThe group wants to “prepared to consider matching or exceeding higher bids,” all of OpenAI’s assets, including ChatGPT.

Swindler

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2025

According to the group, a takeover would refocus OpenAI on open-source AI that could help the world. This was the original goal of the company.

“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk informed The Journal through his lawyer Marc Toberoff. Musk told The Journal that X’s Grok AI was an example of the work OpenAI should be doing. The billionaire claimed “At x.AI, we live by the values I was promised OpenAI would follow,” . “We’ve made Grok open source, and we respect the rights of content creators.”

Baron Capital Group Inc. is part of the consortium that submitted the bid. Other members include Valor Management LLC. Atreides Management, LP. Vy Fund III L.P. Emmanuel Capital Management LLC. and Eight Partners VC LLC. Musk’s x.AI artificial-intelligence company is also backing the bid, and could end merging with OpenAI if it is accepted.

It is noted that Musk’s attempts to purchase OpenAI may cause Altman’s plans to take the company public to face problems. The for-profit arm of the company must buy the assets of the nonprofit that controls it at a fair cost. The bid increases the value of the assets, so the for-profit company would have to pay more.

Toberoff wrote to California’s Attorneys General last month, asking them to open up bidding to determine the value for OpenAI’s charitable assets. Musk and others think OpenAI will undervalue the nonprofit after it is spun off.

Musk criticized Donald Trump’s Stargate Project last month. OpenAI, Oracle MGX and SoftBank will be among the tech giants who will invest $500 billion over four years in building data centres in the US. He said “They don’t have the money.”

when OpenAI announced a $100 billion investment.

They don’t have the money

– Elon Musk, January 22, 2025.

Musk and Altman were co-founders of OpenAI in 2015. He left the company three year later due to what he claimed was a conflict with Tesla.

Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman for breaching their original contract in 2024. He claimed that the pair had put profit before developing AI that would benefit humanity. He ended the legal battle a few month later without explaining why.

Musk began a new legal battle in November against OpenAI, when he filed a lawsuit against the company, its co-founders and its main investor Microsoft in order to prevent it from becoming a for-profit entity.

Yesterday, it was reported that Musk had denied earlier reports about his interest in buying TikTok’s US assets.