Elon Musk Was Offered to Buy OpenAI for an Absurd Amount of Money
Having purchased Twitter and taken a leading role in the Trump administration , the world’s richest man has now set his sights on a new target: tech industry darling OpenAI. In a move first reported by The Wall Street Journal , Elon Musk apparently proposed a $97.4 billion offer to the company’s board of directors on Monday morning to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI.
In addition to Musk, the proposal is backed by venture capitalists including Hollywood media mogul Ari Emanuel and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, so he is not acting alone. However, this would be a major step for Musk, who has publicly fought OpenAI and has been working to develop his own alternative in X’s Grok .
The proposal also follows OpenAI’s announcement with President Trump of Project Stargate , a plan to invest $500 billion to build domestic artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US. Again, OpenAI is not alone in this initiative: it has received financial support from SoftBank, Oracle and MGX, as well as technology support from Nvidia, Arm and Microsoft.
In other words, if the acquisition had gone through, OpenAI’s partners would now suddenly have completely unexpected new faces to deal with.
The proposal comes amid OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s attempt to restructure the nonprofit into a for-profit company and efforts to raise $40 billion in funding , which would take the startup’s value to more than $340 billion . Altman had already posted a brief message on X, rejecting Musk’s offer and joking in response that OpenAI was willing to buy the former Twitter for $9.74 billion.
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While it’s harsh, Altman’s answer may not be the end of the sentence, since the CEO still has to contend with other board members: OpenAI’s structure means that no board member has direct equity in the company, making voting on such decisions a team effort. In addition, Microsoft already has a minority economic stake in the company, and it is possible that the company will no longer want to maintain this relationship under new management.
Be that as it may, this is not the first time Musk has argued with OpenAI. The billionaire actually co-founded the nonprofit OpenAI with Altman in 2015 before leaving it in 2019 . OpenAI later wrote that Musk said the group’s “probability of success is 0.”
Now it seems 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 being a security-focused open source company for good.”