CEO Sam Altman said ‘no thank you’ and proposed purchasing X instead
Elon Musk, leading a consortium of investors, has made an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid to acquire OpenAI, aiming to restore the artificial intelligence company he co-founded to its original mission of developing technology for the benefit of humanity.
The offer was presented to OpenAI’s board of directors on Monday, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Musk’s proposal seeks 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.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed the offer and mockingly suggested purchasing Musk’s social media platform, X, for $9.74 billion instead. 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 commercialization efforts and close partnership with Microsoft.
In March 2024, Musk sued OpenAI, alleging it had strayed from its founding principles by prioritizing profit over its mission to serve humanity.
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,” according to a statement cited by AP.
The leading U.S. artificial intelligence research organization, OpenAI, faces growing competition from Chinese AI firms, notably DeepSeek. In January 2025, the Hangzhou-based startup unveiled its open-source AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which reportedly matches or surpasses OpenAI’s models in areas such as mathematical reasoning and code generation.
Musk, meanwhile, has been developing his own AI company, xAI, which launched in 2023. The company introduced Grok, a chatbot integrated into X (formerly Twitter), designed to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Musk has positioned xAI as a challenger to OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, focusing on building AI systems that prioritize truthfulness and transparency.
To strengthen the United States’ position in the global AI race, President Donald Trump announced the Stargate project in January 2025. The initiative, a collaboration between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, aims to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure over four years. According to recent reports, SoftBank is close to finalizing a $40 billion investment deal, which would value OpenAI at $260 billion.
