OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Dismisses Musk's $97.4 Bln Offer

(RTTNews) - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated in an internal message to the staff that the board has no interest in Elon Musk's $97.4 billion offer to purchase the artificial intelligence company.

This comes as the Tesla (TSLA) owner along with investment firm Vy Capital, his AI company xAI, and Hollywood power broker Ari Emanuel, led the bid to take control of OpenAI and steer it back to a non-profit organization.

Altman swiftly dismissed the offer in a post on X/Twitter, stating, "No thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want."

In response, the SpaceX owner fired back, calling Altman a "swindler", reigniting tensions between the two tech leaders. Musk has been a vocal critic of OpenAI's shift toward commercialization, arguing that it strayed from its original mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.

Last year, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman alleging that the organization is developing AI for profitability instead of the company's foundational mission of utilizing it for the benefit of humankind.

The lawsuit stated that Altman supported Musk's concerns over artificial general intelligence earlier, and in 2015 they together with Greg Brockman agreed to create a non-profit AI lab, known as OpenAI. They agreed that the lab would be 'for the benefit of humanity' and would be open source.

However, OpenAI partnered with Microsoft (MSFT) after Musk left the company in 2018. Now, Microsoft is considered as the biggest contributor of the ChatGPT maker with billions of investments.

Musk stated in the lawsuit that Altman and Brockman had betrayed the founding agreement by launching GPT-4 and keeping its design a secret.