A group of investors including Elon Musk has proposed a bid to acquire artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI — the maker of ChatGPT — for almost £80 billion.
Musk’s lawyer Marc Toberoff confirmed on Monday an offer of $97.4bn (£78.8bn) had been made to OpenAI’s board of directors for “all assets” of the company.
“It is time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk told The Wall Street Journal. “We will make sure that happens.”
See also: What are the differences between DeepSeek and OpenAI?
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has seen its AI technology adopted by major tech and business names, including Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce, Snap, and more.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, responded to the offer on Musk-owned social media platform X (formerly Twitter), rejecting the deal.
“No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” Altman said.
The Tesla chief responded by calling Altman a “swindler”.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44bn in 2022 before cutting its staff and renaming it X.
Shortly after Altman’s response, Musk shared a 2023 video clip from a Senate subcommittee hearing. In the clip, Altman tells Senator John Kennedy that he has no equity stake in OpenAI and is paid just enough to receive health insurance.
Scam Altman
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2025
pic.twitter.com/j9EXIqBZ8u
However, this occurred the year before OpenAI announced it would pivot from being a non-profit — or 'capped profit' (as the company refers to it) — organisation to a for-profit business. Reuters reported in September 2024 that OpenAI planned to restructure, transferring control from the non-profit board and granting Altman equity in the company.
Musk and Altman originally co-founded the company in 2015 as a non-profit, but tensions grew after Musk left the company in 2018.
Musk disagrees with Altman’s for-profit plans, claiming they undermine OpenAI’s original mission of developing AI for the greater good of humanity.
However, OpenAI defends this shift, arguing that becoming a for-profit entity is necessary to secure the funding needed to continue its work.
OpenAI is securing funding from investment firm SoftBank, which has estimated the company’s total valuation at up to $340bn, according to CNBC. While the company generated approximately $3.7bn in revenue in 2024, it is anticipated to have incurred a total loss of $5bn last year.
What does this mean for OpenAI’s future?
OpenAI, being a private company, doesn’t have publicly traded share prices to gauge its fortunes. However, other tech stocks were heavily impacted last month when Chinese rival DeepSeek launched its AI models.
DeepSeek claims its chatbot-style LLM AI and reasoning-based artificial intelligence use less computational power than OpenAI's models. This announcement led to Nvidia's valuation dropping by $600bn, with a 17 per cent dip in its share price, although it has since partially recovered. Nvidia designs the hardware on which AI software is trained and run.
In response to DeepSeek’s release, OpenAI made its latest o3-mini reasoning AI model available to users, even those who don’t have a subscription.
Altman has previously stated that his ultimate goal is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, his definition of AGI may differ from others. As Altman explained in his blog, AGI is “a system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields”.
