A group of investors led by Elon Musk made an offer of $ 97.4 billion to buy the non -profit activities that controls Openii, according to two people who are familiar with the offer, increasing a year in length and deeply personal for The future of artificial intelligence between Mr. Mr. The CEO of Musk and Openi, Sam Altman.
The Consortium includes Vy Capital and Xai, the artificial intelligence company of Mr. Musk, as well as the Hollywood power broker Ari Emanuel and other investors, said that the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because discussions are underway.
The Wall Street Journal has previously reported news of the offer.
The offer for Openai is the most recent and perhaps more daring attack of Musk to an organization that has contributed to creating almost 10 years ago. He faces long probability: Openi’s Board of Directors is strictly allied with Mr. Altman and the CEO quickly derives from Mr. Musk’s offer.
“No thanks, but we will buy Twitter for $ 9.74 billion if you want,” Altman said on X, referring to the old name for Mr. Musk’s social media platform.
“Swindler,” replied Musk.
Openai has not yet seen the offer, according to a person who is familiar with Openi’s potential response. Mr. Musk’s not requested offer could complicate Openi attempt to complete a fundraising agreement of 40 billion dollars who would almost double the evaluation of the high -profile company only four months ago.
The new fundraising round, led by the Japanese conglomerate Softbank, Openai values at $ 300 billion, according to three people with knowledge of the agreement that spoke on condition of anonymity. The agreement would make Openi one of the most precious private companies in the world, together with the missile company of Mr. Musk, Spacex and Bytedance, the producer of Tiktok.
SoftBank would invest up to $ 40 billion in Openni, with other investors who provide about a quarter of the total funds, said people. (The New York Times sued Openi and its partner, Microsoft, supporting the violation of the copyright of news related to artificial intelligence systems. The two companies denied the affirmations of the cause.)
Mr. Musk’s offer could slow down a corporate transition on which Mr. Altman and other Openi managers have worked for more than a year.
Mr. Musk, Altman and many other entrepreneurs and researchers founded Openai as a non -profit organization at the end of 2015, saying that they wanted to freely share their technologies with the world. When Musk left the organization three years after a battle for control, Altman attacked Openai to a profit for profit so that he could collect the huge quantities of money necessary to build artificial intelligence technologies.
But the non -profit card, in an unusual agreement, continued to control Openi. At the end of 2023, the Council suddenly fired Mr. Altman, saying that he no longer trusted him to build at the benefit of humanity – one of the original principles of non -profit. But the expulsion lasted only five days.
After returning, Mr. Altman and his colleagues began to explore ways to cut the control of the company’s non -profit society. Openi’s board of directors also began to stack with his allies, offering a bulwark against other efforts to snatch control on his part.
Openi’s structure is extraordinarily complex – and the offer of Mr. Musk shows that it includes its weak points. In order to separate from the non -profit council, Altman and his colleagues must compensate it: Openi could pay a one -off commission to the non -profit, for example, or give it a minority share in the company.
While Openai has more than 2,000 employees, the non -profit that controls has only two employees and $ 22 million in cash and other activities. The reason why Mr. Musk and his investors would pay billions because he has legal control over Openi.
But non -profit activities have not received a value – and that’s what Mr. Musk is trying to establish with his new offer. Its offer could mean that Openi’s lucal arm should have spent more to obtain independence from non -profit.
“If Sam Altman and the current Board of Directors of Openi Inc. are willing to become a company completely for profit, it is essential that charity is equally compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over technology More transformative of our time, “said Marc Toberoff, a Los Angeles lawyer who filed a lawsuit against Openii on behalf of Mr. Musk last year, in a declaration at the Times.
The Board of Opens’s No Profit has a duty to sell its activities to the fair market value, said Ellen P. Aprill, a senior scholar who studies without non -profit law at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote widely on Openi. Mr. Musk’s offer now seems to set up that very high value, he said. If the non -profit is to accept a lower price from Openi’s arm for profit, it may have to explain to state charity regulators because it rejected a higher offer.
“It’s a huge complication for the current plan,” he added.
The proposal to move the activities of Openai from non -profit to perfume is already under control by the state charity regulators in Delaware, where Openii and California is incorporated, where the company has its headquarters.
Mr. Musk, now one of the closest councilors of President Trump, has created his artificial intelligence company in 2023 to compete frontally with Openi. While that company, Xai, slowly played to recover a series of start-ups and giants of Ai technology, Altman was able to overcome Mr. Musk in Washington.
The day after Mr. Trump was inaugurated, he supported a plan by Openai, SoftBank and the Oracle software company to spend $ 100 billion in new data centers. Trump described the effort as the “largest artificial intelligence infrastructure project in history”.
On Monday, when Mr. Musk’s offer was sent, Altman was at an Ai conference in Paris in which other technological and political leaders participated, including Emmanuel Macron, the French president and vice -president JD Vance.