The boss of OpenAI insisted the company is ‘not for sale’ yesterday and branded co-founder Elon Musk ‘insecure’ as the pair clashed over its future. Sam Altman said the Tesla boss was not ‘a happy person’ as the billionaires exchanged barbs. Musk launched an unsolicited offer worth nearly £80billion for ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Monday night. In response, Altman, 39, took to Musk’s platform X – formerly Twitter – to say: ‘No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74billion if you want.’.
That is a fraction of the $44billion (£35billion) Musk, 53, paid for the social media site. Musk then branded Altman a ‘swindler’ and dubbed him ‘Scam Altman’. Spat: OpenAI boss Sam Altman (left) exchanged barbs with co-founder Elon Musk (right) after Tesla boss launched an unsolicited near-£80bn offer. It follows the Tesla boss’s criticism of OpenAI claiming the company has strayed from its original mission.
Musk co-founded the business as a charity alongside Altman in 2015 but left four years later after which it established a for-profit arm, souring the relationship between the tech tycoons. Since then, Musk has accused the firm of becoming a ‘maximum profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft’ after the computing giant pumped $13billion into OpenAI, becoming its largest investor. OpenAI is run for profit but is controlled by a non-profit parent entity. The row between the businessmen continued yesterday as Altman toured television studios, declaring in one interview: ‘OpenAI is not for sale. The OpenAI mission is not for sale.’.
Speaking to Bloomberg TV on the sidelines of the Paris AI summit, he chided Musk, saying: ‘Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity – I feel for the guy. I don’t think he’s, like, a happy person. I do feel for him. ‘I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor. I wish he would just compete by building a better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics, many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff, now this.’.
A rift is growing between Musk and other major players in the artificial intelligence (AI) space as the tycoon attempts to grab a bigger slice of the market through his own chatbot, Grok. Last month, he hit out at the Stargate project, a £402billion joint venture between OpenAI, software giant Oracle, Japanese investment group SoftBank and MGX, an AI investment firm based in the United Arab Emirates.
Musk, who was not included in the venture, claimed at the time that OpenAI ‘don’t actually have the money’ for the project. It prompted a retort from Altman, who told Musk he was ‘wrong, as you surely know’. The Tesla boss has also previously filed lawsuits against OpenAI to block its transformation into a for-profit business. US analyst Dan Ives said the bid from Musk was ‘not competitive’ and was more likely designed to slow down OpenAI’s attempts to raise more funding from investors.
He added: ‘The AI arms race is heating up and OpenAI has a very strong market position, which poses a risk to other tech players, including Musk. We would expect the OpenAI Board to formally reject this bid although the Musk-led bid is a fly in the ointment for Altman and OpenAI.’. Affiliate links: If you take out a product This is Money may earn a commission. These deals are chosen by our editorial team, as we think they are worth highlighting. This does not affect our editorial independence.
