After suing OpenAI twice in 2024, Elon Musk has made a blatant attempt to buy out the company. Teaming up with a group of investors, Musk has reportedly made a $97 billion buyout offer to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman has, however, refused the offer and mocked him with a counter offer to buy X for $9bn.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk and his investment partners have officially proposed to OpenAI’s board to take the ownership of the company and restore it to its nonprofit origins.
“If Sam Altman and the current board want OpenAI to become a fully for-profit company, it’s important that the charity is fairly compensated for losing control of such groundbreaking technology,” Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff said.
Altman expressed his displeasure in response to Musk’s post on X, saying, “”No thanks, but we’d be willing to buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you’re interested.” This was a counter offer mocking Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, now X, in 2022.
Musk had been one of the initial backers of OpenAI who had helped its founding members. The goal was to build a nonprofit organisation focused on artifical intelligence. But as time passed, the company had drifted away from its founding principles and embraced commercialised, profit-driven structure.
This capitalist mindset of the company put OpenAI’s work at risk of being driven by corporate interests instead of delivering benefits for humanity. There was a conflict of interests between Musk’s vision for AI and OpenAI’s pursuit of growth and profitability.
Consequently, Musk had filed multiple lawsuits against OpenAI in July and August 2024 in the wake of escalating conflicts. Musk had then accused the company of engaging in profiteering and racketeering. The company had gradually taken a shift to “capped-profit” model, a far cry from its original mission.
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