According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, submitted a bid to OpenAI’s board to acquire all of the company’s assets.
The offer was swiftly rejected, prompting CEO Sam Altman to mock Musk on X: “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
The saga may not be over yet. Toberoff told The Journal the consortium is willing to raise its bid and match any others, just as OpenAI’s board moves to restructure the company from a nonprofit with a for-profit subsidiary into a full-fledged business.
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Musk’s only public comment on the deal at the time of writing was in response to Altman’s rejection, calling him a “swindler”.
Swindler— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2025
In addition to Musk, the reported consortium looking to buy OpenAI also includes Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the AI software firm Palantir, and Ari Emanuel, the CEO of both entertainment firm Endeavor and TKO Group Holdings, which owns the UFC and WWE.
If successful, the consortium wants to restore OpenAI to its open source roots, opening up access to its currently closed-off models.
“At xAI, we live by the values I was promised OpenAI would follow,” Musk said in a statement through his attorney. “We’ve made Grok open source, and we respect the rights of content creators. 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.”
Musk co-founded OpenAI, providing the financial clout for the then-non-profit. He left in 2018, however, after falling out over OpenAI’s shift away from being a non-profit.
In the wake of OpenAI’s meteoric rise, Musk has since attacked OpenAI at every turn, claiming its models stifle free speech and that its commercialisation of AI risks putting artificial general intelligence or AGI into the hands of corporations.
After founding a rival startup in xAI, Musk has since tried to sue OpenAI for breach of contract, fraud, racketeering, false advertising and unfair competition — only for his legal action to unearth documents that he was in favour of a for-profit pivot, suggesting merging OpenAI into Tesla.
Court filings that surfaced last November revealed concerns about potential conflicts between Tesla's shareholder obligations and OpenAI's mission, as well the end of OpenAI’s relationship with Musk.
Now, Musk wants control of the startup having previously been rejected from serving as its CEO.
His consortium’s $97.4 billion is well below OpenAI’s $157 billion valuation following its historic October 2024 funding round — that’s more than the market caps of Adobe, Qualcomm, AMD, and Reliance Industries.
OpenAI’s ongoing restructuring is expected to be completed in 2026, with its board claiming the shift is vital to secure access capital as it scales up its custom chip product and spearheads the $500 billion Stargate project.
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