In what is becoming an increasingly tiresome and petty personal spat between a pair of tech billionaires, the Wall Street Journal reports Monday that a consortium backed by xAI CEO Elon Musk has made an unsolicited, $97.4 billion bid for control over rival OpenAI. This offer comes mere months after Musk sued the company over its plan to transition to a for-profit business structure.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” the WSJ cited Musk as saying in a statement provided by his lawyer, Marc Toberoff, to the OpenAI board. “We will make sure that happens.”
The WSJ reports that the bid is being backed by xAI, which would likely merge with OpenAI, should the deal eventually go through. The board has not made any decisions about the offer as of yet, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly rejected Musk’s overtures, offering to instead purchase Twitter (now, officially, X “The Everything App”) for the same amount.
no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 10, 2025
Musk and Altman have been at this for years now. The two co-founded OpenAI in 2015, though Musk resigned from his position as co-chair of the company’s board in 2018 after his demands for “majority equity, absolute control, and to be CEO,” were rejected. He went on to found xAI in 2023 — purveyors of the Grok chatbot — and has since committed to relentlessly harassing OpenAI, and Sam Altman in particular.
In March 2023, half a year before founding xAI, Musk cosigned an open letter calling for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” It is surely only a coincidence that xAI itself publicly launched almost exactly six months after that letter was published.
In November of that year, shortly after Altman had been (temporarily) rousted from his leadership position at OpenAI, Musk shared an unsigned and anonymous letter that he “received” that accused Altman of numerous unethical dealings as CEO. The source of those accusations were eventually tracked to unverified posts made to Board.com, an anonymous message board site.
Musk has sued OpenAI multiple times in 2024 alone. In March, he sued the company along with Altman and the company’s President, Greg Brockman, over allegations that they had violated the company’s founding contract in their pursuit of commercial interests at the expense of the public good, though he subsequently withdrew the suit the day before a judge was scheduled to hand down their ruling on whether it could proceed or would be dismissed.
He revived that lawsuit in August with the same claims as before. “Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon — and in just eight years,” the complaint reads. “After Musk lent his name to the venture, invested significant time, tens of millions of dollars in seed capital and recruited top AI scientists for OpenAI Inc, Musk and the non-profit’s namesake objective were betrayed by Altman and his accomplices.”
In November, Musk abruptly amended the suit, expanding it to target OpenAI-backer, Microsoft, while naming Shivon Zilis, mother of three of Musk’s children, as a plaintiff. OpenAI responded in December with a blog post titled, “Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit,” detailing Musk’s initial support for the for-profit transition and provided email records to back up those assertions. The courts have not yet ruled on the ongoing lawsuit, but given that the running feud between the two men now stretches more than six years, there’s little hope that this latest salvo will be the last of their fight.