Elon Musk has said he will abandon his billion-dollar offer to buy artificial intelligence company OpenAI on one condition.
Earlier this week, the Tesla owner and a group of investors made an offer of $97.4 billion to buy OpenAI.
However, Altman gave a savage response on X to Musk's bid, rejecting it altogether. He also told questioners at a Paris summit on AI that the company is 'not for sale.' If anything, the offer has escalated the already heated tensions between Musk and OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman.
The SpaceX owner helped found the AI company over a decade ago but left due to a power struggle.
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Now, the tech billionaire has agreed to drop his bid if OpenAI agrees to 'preserve its mission' and remain a nonprofit organisation.
In legal documents filed on Wednesday, Musk’s lawyers stated that if OpenAI’s board stops its corporate restructuring, he will withdraw his bid.
“If OpenAI Inc.’s Board is prepared to preserve the charity’s mission and stipulate to take the ‘for sale’ sign off its assets by halting its conversion, Musk will withdraw the bid,” the court filing said.
“Otherwise, the charity must be compensated by what an arms-length buyer will pay for its assets.”
OpenAI started as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the public good, but it has gradually shifted toward a more corporate structure.
Musk founded his AI company xAI in 2023, along with a group of investors. As such, he and his lawyers argue that OpenAI should go back to its original model of being a nonprofit research lab.
If that happened, it would no longer be a business competitor to xAI, which recently secured $6 billion in funding.
The Musk-Altman feud has been going on for many years. While they co-founded OpenAI in 2015, their relationship soured over disagreements about the company’s direction, particularly whether it should be run for profit.
Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018, and since then, things have only gotten messier.
The world's richest man took another shot at Altman’s leadership on Thursday during a video call at the World Government Summit in Dubai. He compared it to a non-profit dedicated to protecting the Amazon rainforest which became a 'lumber company that chops down the trees.'
“OpenAI is meant to be [an] open-source nonprofit, and now it is closed,” Musk said at the Summit. “They changed the name to closed for maximum profit, AI closed for voracious profit.”
Altman has previously said Musk is an 'unhappy' person motivated by 'insecurity.'
Meanwhile, Musk has called out the CEO on social media calling him 'Scam Altman.'