After Elon Musk Bid, Sam Altman Says OpenAI Is ‘Not for Sale’

Sam Altman is pushing back on an unsolicited bid made by Elon Musk and a group of investors to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI. The $97.4 billion bid, made by Musk’s AI company, xAI, and backed by several investment firms, deepens the ongoing battle between Musk and Altman over OpenAI, which they co-founded in 2015.

The bid, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, comes as Altman plans to transition OpenAI into a for-profit company. OpenAI also recently announced the Stargate Project, a joint venture that plans to invest up to $500 billion in new AI infrastructure for OpenAI over the next four years. 

Altman and Musk are already facing off in court, with Musk alleging that Altman strayed from the nonprofit’s mission to create AI to benefit humanity, and OpenAI countering at one point that Musk himself had wanted to turn OpenAI into a for-profit entity. OpenAI has said that a for-profit arm is needed to support the humanity-benefiting mission. Both Musk and Altman are set to attend the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris on Tuesday to discuss safety guardrails for AI.

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“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement, according to the Journal. “We will make sure that happens.”

In a tweeted response to the bid, Altman referenced Musk’s social media company, X — formerly Twitter — and said, “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” shifting the decimal point in Musk’s bid to the left. Altman also told OpenAI employees that Musk’s bid was a move “to try and weaken us because we are making great progress,” the Journal reported.

Expert: ‘Unclear’ what Musk hopes to accomplish

OpenAI started as a nonprofit, but after Musk departed years later and Altman became CEO, the company began raising money from investors, including Microsoft, as part of a for-profit subsidiary. Now that Altman is working to convert the for-profit subsidiary into a traditional company in a bid to make it more profitable, questions remain about how the nonprofit division will be valued and what that means for consumers.

“We can already see what a shift to for-profit looks like for OpenAI,” Paul Schell, industry analyst at market research firm ABI Research, told CNET. “They are one of the most commercially mature AI firms currently operating in the market, regardless of their true intentions behind their frontier model development. In other words, if today’s operation is ‘philanthropic’ or in the pursuit of something other than profit, then a transition to for-profit would not look much different.”

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But how this would directly affect consumers remains unknown; it could shake out in user costs, but “future pricing is extremely hard to predict,” Schell said.

“If an innovation on either the hardware or software side drastically decreases costs and the innovating firm can capitalize on this for market share, others will be forced to follow,” Schell said. “Equally, if models become transformative and more deeply integrated into people’s workflows and lives, we might be willing to pay more for access.”

As for Musk, Schell said it’s unclear what he’s trying to accomplish with the bid for OpenAI. 

“Even if he had the funds — OpenAI is aiming for a much higher valuation — the board would not agree to such a move because there is a deep rift between Altman and Musk,” Schell said.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV on Tuesday, Altman said he believes Musk’s bid is part of a greater effort “to slow us down.” Musk’s xAI is a direct competitor to OpenAI, and Musk has devoted a great deal of time and energy to developing a product to compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT service.

“OpenAI is not for sale. The OpenAI mission is not for sale. Elon tries all sorts of things for a long time. This is, you know, this week’s episode,” Altman said in the interview.

“I wish he would just compete by building a better product,” he added. “But I think there’s a lot of tactics, many, many lawsuits and all sorts of crazy things, and now this. We’ll just try to put our head down and keep working.”