OpenAI board rejects Elon Musk-led $97 billion purchase offer

New York (CNN) — OpenAI’s board of directors has formally rejected a $97.4 billion bid by Elon Musk and other investors to purchase the company.

“OpenAI is not for sale, and the board has unanimously rejected Mr. Musk’s latest attempt to disrupt his competition,” OpenAI Board Chair Bret Taylor said in a statement posted to X on Friday.

The statement marks the latest twist in a long-running feud between OpenAI and Musk over the ChatGPT maker’s planned restructuring. OpenAI was founded — by a group that included Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — as a non-profit research lab with a for-profit entity, but it is aiming to restructure in a way that could make fundraising easier and increase returns for investors and employees.

Musk has criticized that plan as an abdication of OpenAI’s non-profit mission, and on Monday, a Musk-led group of investors offered to buy the company to return it to an “open-source, safety-focused force.” The bid could have led to a monumental shake-up in the AI industry and made Musk, owner of OpenAI competitor xAI, an even more powerful force in tech.

But OpenAI quickly rebuffed the offer, with Altman posting to X on Monday: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

Taylor, who also happened to lead the board of X (then Twitter) when Musk began his takeover bid for that company, said in his Friday statement on behalf of OpenAI’s board: “Any potential reorganization of OpenAI will strengthen our nonprofit and its mission to ensure (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity.”

Marc Toberoff, an attorney for the Musk-led investor group, said in a statement that the rejection was “no surprise” given Altman’s earlier statement, and disputed Altman’s claim that OpenAI is not for sale.

However, he added the group was surprised to see the action coming from the board, “which has strict fiduciary duties to carefully consider the bid in good faith on behalf of the charity.”

“They’re just selling it to themselves at a fraction of what Musk has offered,” Toberoff said. “Will someone please explain how that benefits ‘all of humanity?’”

It’s not the first time Musk has tried to put up hurdles to OpenAI’s restructuring plan.

Musk sued OpenAI in June 2024 but dropped that initial lawsuit after the company published a blog post that included several of Musk’s emails from OpenAI’s early days. The emails appeared to show Musk acknowledging the need for the company to make large sums of money to fund the computing resources needed to power its AI ambitions, which stood in contrast to the claims in his lawsuit that OpenAI was wrongly pursuing profit.

Musk filed a new lawsuit in August 2024 and accused OpenAI of racing to develop powerful “artificial general intelligence” technology to “maximize profits.” Musk also accused the company of engaging in racketeering.

OpenAI, meanwhile, has accused Musk of essentially being jealous that he was no longer involved in the startup, after he left OpenAI in 2018 following an unsuccessful bid to convince his fellow co-founders to let Tesla acquire it.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV at the AI Summit in Paris on Tuesday, Altman said of Musk: “I wish he would just compete by building a better product.”

CNN’s David Goldman contributed to this report.

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