Elon Musk makes offer to buy ChatGPT AI giant for £79bn in clash with Sam Altman Elon Musk has bid £79 billion to buy OpenAI in an escalating argument over the plan by the artificial intelligence firm behind ChatGPT to become for profit.
Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued the company last year, first in a California state court and later in federal court, alleging it had betrayed its founding aims as a nonprofit research lab that would benefit the public good by safely building better-than-human AI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the unsolicited bid on Musk’s social platform X, saying, “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for $44 billion in 2022.
Lawyers for OpenAI and Musk faced off in a California federal court last week as a judge weighed Musk’s request for a court order that would block the ChatGPT maker from converting itself to a for-profit company.
Since both state offices must “ensure any such transactional process relating to OpenAI’s charitable assets provides at least fair market value to protect the public’s beneficial interest, we assume you will provide a process for competitive bidding to actually determine that fair market value,” Toberoff wrote, asking for more information on the terms and timing of that bidding process.
