OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has responded to Elon Musk’s offer to buy the artificial intelligence startup’s assets by saying it’s not for sale.
“OpenAI is not for sale,” Altman told Axios during the AI Action Summit in Paris. “OpenAI’s mission is not for sale — to say nothing of the fact that, like, a competitor who is not able to beat us in the market and you know, instead is just trying to say, like, ‘I’m gonna buy this’ with total disregard for the mission is a likely path there.”
Altman told Axios that other “versions of Elon” have tried to take control of the AI startup “for a long time.”
On Monday, Musk’s lawyer Marc Toberoff submitted a bid to OpenAI’s board of directors for all of its assets, the Wall Street Journal (NWS) reported. A group of investors led by Musk has reportedly offered to buy the nonprofit controlling the AI startup for $97.4 billion.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement shared with the Wall Street Journal through his lawyer. “We will make sure that happens.”
In response to the report, Altman said in a post on X $TWTR: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Musk replied to Altman, calling him a “Swindler.”
“I think it’s to slow down a competitor and catch up with his thing, but I don’t really know ... to the degree anybody does,” Altman told the press at the AI Action Summit, according to CNBC.
In a TV interview with Bloomberg, Altman said on Tuesday that he wished Musk “would just compete by building a better product,” and that he doesn’t think Musk is “a happy person.”
On Monday, Altman told OpenAI staff that the board had rejected Musk’s offer before even seeing an official bid, and called the effort “just embarrassing to watch,” according to The Information.
The offer to buy OpenAI’s assets is being backed by Musk’s rival AI startup, xAI, the Wall Street Journal reported, adding that Musk has other investors backing him including Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital, and 8VC.
Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015, but left in 2018 over a conflict of interest with the company’s development. The billionaire filed a lawsuit against the AI startup in March for allegedly betraying its founding commitment to benefit humanity over making profit by partnering with one of its largest investors, Microsoft $MSFT (MSFT). Musk withdrew his initial complaint in June, but later sued OpenAI and Altman again in August.
OpenAI confirmed in December that it is planning to restructure operations to separate its for-profit and non-profit businesses in an effort to raise funding. The AI startup raised $6.6 billion in October, boosting its valuation to $157 billion. It is reportedly currently in talks to raise a funding round led by SoftBank (SFTBY) of up to $40 billion. The funding round could bring OpenAI’s valuation to $340 billion.
Altman told Axios that OpenAI’s board has not determined a valuation for its operations, and is still figuring it out.
“There’s a lot of complicated structural things about how to get this set up right for the long term,” he said.
Last month, Toberoff sent letters to the attorneys general of California, where the AI startup is based, and Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, to ask that OpenAI auction its non-profit’s stake to fairly compensate its conversion to a for-profit, according to The Information.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is partnering with SoftBank, Oracle $ORCL (ORCL), and other tech giants on the Stargate Project — a joint venture to invest $500 billion to build new AI infrastructure over the next four years.