The Insane Sum Elon Musk is Offering to Buy the AI Giant – and the Response

According to The Wall Street Journal, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, is leading a group of investors proposing to acquire OpenAI for approximately $98 billion. Meanwhile, OpenAI is currently in discussions to raise capital at a valuation of $340 billion. The company's founder and CEO, Sam Altman, wasted no time in responding dismissively to Musk’s offer with a tweet on X.

The current proposal has reportedly been submitted to OpenAI’s board, and Altman quickly responded with a sarcastic tweet : "No thanks, but we’ll buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you’d like".

OpenAI is considered the leading company in artificial intelligence, responsible for revolutionizing the industry in recent years—especially after launching the ChatGPT chatbot just over two years ago.

Musk’s offer follows a prolonged legal and public dispute between him and Altman over OpenAI’s transformation from a nonprofit research project into a massive corporation raising capital at hundreds of billions of dollars in valuation and working in conjunction with Microsoft.

According to the WSJ report, Musk’s proposal specifically targets OpenAI’s nonprofit arm—though understanding the difference between that and the rest of the company might require AI assistance.

Currently, OpenAI is working on transitioning into a for-profit company and is seeking to raise $40 billion at a valuation of $340 billion, led by SoftBank. Additionally, OpenAI is involved in building AI infrastructure at an estimated cost of $500 billion, as part of the "Project Stargate", announced in collaboration with President Donald Trump.

Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but Musk left the project in 2019 and has since become one of its harshest critics and is currently suing OpenAI, claiming the company betrayed its original mission to develop safe and open AI.

Today, Musk runs his own AI company, xAI, which developed the Grok chatbot, now integrated into the X platform. In a statement through his attorney to given to The Journal, Musk was quoted saying: "It’s time for OpenAI to return to being an open-source, safety-focused force for good, as it was originally intended. We will make sure that happens."

In response to Altman’s cynical tweet, Musk simply fired back:"Swindler."