- OpenAI’s board of directors on Friday unanimously rejected Elon Musk’s bid to buy the company.
- A Musk-led investor group on Monday submitted an unprompted $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI.
- Bret Taylor, chair of OpenAI’s board, called it “Musk’s latest attempt to disrupt his competition.”
OpenAI’s board of directors on Friday flatly refused Elon Musk’s unprompted bid to buy the company.
“OpenAI is not for sale, and the board has unanimously rejected Mr. Musk’s latest attempt to disrupt his competition. Any potential reorganization of OpenAI will strengthen our nonprofit and its mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity,” Bret Taylor, chair of OpenAI’s board, said in a Friday statement posted on X.
A Musk-led investor group on Monday submitted an unprompted $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI. The bid immediately garnered staunch refusals from CEO Sam Altman, who said in several public interviews at an AI summit in Paris that the company — and its mission to ensure artificial intelligence benefits humanity — is not for sale.
“There’s been like versions of Elon trying to, you know, somehow take control of OpenAI for a long time, so, it’s like, okay, here’s this week’s episode,” Altman told Axios.
In a statement to Business Insider, Marc Toberoff, an attorney for the investor group, said OpenAI’s rejection of the bid “comes as no surprise, given that Altman and Board chair, Taylor, already rejected Musk’s $97 billion bid while stating they had not yet received it.”
“But we are surprised to see the Board, which has strict fiduciary duties to carefully consider the bid in good faith on behalf of the charity, use the same kind of deflective double-talk Altman used in testifying to the Senate,” Toberoff’ said. “Of course they’re putting the charity’s assets (control of the for-profit enterprise) up for sale. That’s what their ‘reorganization’ is all about. They’re just selling it to themselves at a fraction of what Musk has offered, enriching Board members, Altman, Brockman, and others rather than the charity in a classic self-dealing transaction. Will someone please explain how that benefits ‘all of humanity’?”
Musk and Altman cofounded OpenAI together years ago, but their relationship soured after Musk departed the company in 2018 and founded his own AI venture, xAI. The tech titans have since repeatedly traded public barbs over their conflicting views about the development of artificial intelligence.
Musk filed suit against OpenAI and its executives in March 2024, alleging that the company’s direction in recent years had violated its founding principles. He later withdrew the complaint. In a separate August suit, Musk alleged he was “manipulated” into cofounding the company.
In a Monday statement about his proposal to buy OpenAI, Musk said, “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.”
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
