Elon Musk Offered to Buy OpenAI for an Absurd Amount of Money

After buying Twitter and taking a chief role in the Trump administration, the world’s richest man now has his sights set on a new target: tech industry darling OpenAI. In a move first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk supposedly delivered a $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI to the company's board on Monday morning.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, according to sources that spoke to Wired, conversely said the offer has not yet been officially delivered to his company; however, Musk's intent has still been confirmed by CNBC.

In addition to Musk, the purchase would have backing from venture capitalists, including Hollywood media mogul Ari Emanuel and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, so he isn’t going it alone. Still, it would be a major move for Musk, who has publicly beefed with OpenAI and worked to develop his own alternative in X’s Grok.

The offer also follows OpenAI’s announcement, alongside President Trump, of Project Stargate, a plan to invest $500 billion in building out the U.S.'s domestic AI infrastructure. Again, OpenAI is not alone in this initiative, having garnered financial support from SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, as well as technology support from Nvidia, Arm, and Microsoft.

In other words, if the purchase were to go through, OpenAI’s partners would now suddenly have some quite unexpected new faces to contend with.

The offer comes amidst OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s attempt to restructure the nonprofit into a for-profit company as well as an effort to raise $40 billion in funding, which would place the value of the startup at over $340 billion. Altman has already posted a curt message on X declining Musk’s offer, and joking back that OpenAI would be willing to buy the former Twitter for $9.74 billion.

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OK, brutal. But leaving the realm of social media beefs behind, Wired's sources confirmed to the publication that OpenAI's board, which could potentially outvote Altman if desired, plans to reject Musk's official offer if and when it comes through. According to both Wired and The Information, Altman also seemed to confirm this in a letter sent to employees saying that said the board has no interest in the offer.

"Our structure exists to ensure that no individual can take control of OpenAI," Altman reportedly wrote. "Elon runs a competitive AI company, and his actions are not about OpenAI’s mission or values."

For what it’s worth, this isn’t Musk’s first time wrangling with OpenAI. The billionaire actually co-founded the nonprofit arm of OpenAI alongside Altman in 2015 before departing in 2019. OpenAI later wrote that Musk said the group’s “probability of success was 0.”

Now, it appears his attitude has changed. In a statement his lawyer provided to The Wall Street Journal, Musk said “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was.”

Update 2/12: Updated to reflect information from Wired and The Information regarding the status of Musk's offer and the OpenAI board's position on it.