Elon Musk leads an offer to buy ChatGPT’s parent company for nearly $100 billion

In a high-stakes bid that could reshape the future of artificial intelligence, Elon Musk is leading a group of investors that have offered to buy OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, for $97.4 billion.

In a high-stakes bid that could reshape the future of artificial intelligence, Elon Musk is leading a group of investors who have offered to buy OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, for $97.4 billion. Musk has long feuded with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and has filed a number of legal complaints against the company and Altman, claiming that the AI company and its leadership have misrepresented OpenAI as a philanthropy. Musk claims that OpenAI has broken with its founding charter by seeking to make a profit with its AI tools. OpenAI is operated by a nonprofit that controls an entity called OpenAI LP, a for-profit company that exists within the larger company’s structure. That for-profit company took OpenAI from effectively worthless to a valuation of around $100 billion in just a few years — and Altman is largely credited as the mastermind of that plan and the key to the company’s success. The massive investment from Musk, first reported in the Wall Street Journal, could give Musk majority control of the company, which rivals his X.AI artificial intelligence company. “If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI, Inc. Board of Directors are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time,” said Marc Toberoff, an attorney representing the investors, in a statement. “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.” In response, Altman said in a post on X, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”