After buying Twitter and taking a chief role in the Trump administration, the world’s richest man now has his sights set on a new target: tech industry darling OpenAI. In a move first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk apparently delivered a $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI to the company’s board on Monday morning.
In addition to Musk, the offer has backing from venture capitalists, including Hollywood media mogul Ari Emanuel and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, so he isn’t going it alone. Still, it would be a major move for Musk, who has publicly beefed with OpenAI and worked to develop his own alternative in X’s Grok.
The offer also follows OpenAI’s announcement, alongside President Trump, of Project Stargate, a plan to invest $500 billion in building out the U.S.’s domestic AI infrastructure. Again, OpenAI is not alone in this initiative, having garnered financial support from SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, as well as technology support from Nvidia, Arm, and Microsoft.
In other words, if the purchase were to go through, OpenAI’s partners would now suddenly have some quite unexpected new faces to contend with.
The offer comes amidst OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s attempt to restructure the nonprofit into a for-profit company as well as an effort to raise $40 billion in funding, which would place the value of the startup at over $340 billion. Altman has already posted a curt message on X declining Musk’s offer, and joking back that OpenAI would be willing to buy the former Twitter for $9.74 billion.
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While, OK, brutal, Altman’s response might not be the end of the offer, as the CEO still has to contend with fellow board members: OpenAI’s structure means no board members hold direct equity in the company, which makes voting on such decisions a team effort. Additionally, Microsoft already owns a minority economic interest in the company, and it’s possible the company would no longer wish to pursue this relationship under new leadership.
For what it’s worth, this isn’t Musk’s first time wrangling with OpenAI. The billionaire actually co-founded the nonprofit arm of OpenAI alongside Altman in 2015 before departing in 2019. OpenAI later wrote that Musk said the group’s “probability of success was 0.”
Now, it appears his attitude has changed. In a statement his lawyer provided to The Wall Street Journal, Musk said “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was.”