A consortium of investors led by the head of the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Elon Musk is ready to buy the non-profit organization that controls the activities of the company OpenAI, which created the chatbot ChatGPT, for $97.4 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.
According to the media, on February 10, Musk's lawyer Mark Toberoff applied for membership in the board of directors of OpenAI. However, the head of this company Sam Altman has already essentially rejected Musk's offer. "No, thank you. “If you want, we can buy Twitter (Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, which he later renamed X) for $9.74 billion,” Altman wrote in X.
The Wall Street Journal noted that the acquisition offer could complicate Altman’s plans to turn OpenAI into a commercial enterprise.
In March 2024, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman over the company’s commercialization. He claims that OpenAI’s focus on profit, backed by U.S. technology giant Microsoft, is inconsistent with the 2015 contractual agreement that Musk signed as a co-founder.
Musk and Altman, along with Ilya Stzukever, Greg Brockman and others, founded OpenAI in December 2015. Musk was a member of the company's board of directors but left in 2018. In the spring of 2023, he founded an AI startup called xAI.