Elon Musk really wants control of OpenAI so he has teamed up with other investors to bid nearly $100bn for it

Elon Musk is not happy with the direction he sees OpenAI heading -- so much so that he wants to buy back the artificial intelligence firm he co-founded. The billionaire walked away from OpenAI more than five years ago, but he does not like the way CEO Sam Altman is handling things.

Musk being Musk, deep pockets and all, has teamed up with other investors to buy “all assets” of OpenAI. The consortium has put a bid of $97.4 billion on the table, and Musk has stated that he will ensure that (assuming he is able to make the purchase he so desperately wants) “OpenAI [...] return[s] to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was”.

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That Elon Musk has issues with Sam Altman is no secret, and there have been various legal wranglings between the pair over the years. The catalyst for the pooling of resources and trying to buy OpenAI appears to be the company’s restructuring plans which include a shift away from being a non-profit organization.

News of the bid was first shared by the Wall Street Journal.

Musk already has another AI firm, xAI, so it’s hard to tell just what he’d do with a second. He issued the following statement, however:

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. It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens.

It is a sentiment echoed by Marc Toberoff, the investment consortium’s attorney:

If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI, Inc. Board of Directors 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.

Sam Altman is unimpressed, taking to X to rebuff Musk with a pointed jibe:

What happens next is not clear, but Musk is unlikely to give up on his dream of wrestling back control of OpenAI.

Image credit: L9871456 / Dreamstime.com