Elon Musk offers $97bn to buy ChatGPT-maker OpenAI
11 February 2025, 08:11
Elon Musk has offered $97 billion (£78.3 billion) to buy ChatGPT creator OpenAI - just months after suing the start-up he helped found.
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Musk, alongside a consortium of investment firms and his own AI start-up xAI, have said they want to buy the tech company in a bid to revert it back to its “charitable mission” as a non-profit research lab.
Billionaire Trump ally Musk founded OpenAI alongside current chief executive Sam Altman in 2015 but left the company after their relationship grew tense.
The company was originally founded as a non-profit organisation but is now transitioning to a for-profit model.
A statement from Musk read: "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was.
"We will make sure that happens."
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman quickly rejected the deal on Mr Musk's social media platform X, saying "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want".
Mr Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for 44 billion dollars in 2022.
Musk had invested about 45 million dollars (£36 million) in the start-up from its founding until 2018, Mr Toberoff said in court last week.
Mr Musk and OpenAI lawyers faced off in a California federal court last week as a judge weighed up Mr Musk's request for a court order that would block the ChatGPT-maker from converting itself to a for-profit company.
OpenAI was valued at $157bn in its last round of funding - meaning any bid from Musk would have to be substantially higher than the one currently on the table.