Elon Musk says he'll drop OpenAI bid if its board does this: report

Elon Musk will withdraw his unsolicited bid of $97.4 billion to take over OpenAI if its board of directors stops the company’s conversion into a for-profit entity, a report said.

The development reported by The Wall Street Journal comes after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rejected Musk’s offer earlier this week, saying that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO is “probably just trying to slow us down” and that OpenAI – the maker of ChatGPT – is not for sale.

“If [the] OpenAI board is prepared to preserve the charity’s mission and stipulate to take the ‘for sale’ sign off its assets by halting its conversion, Musk will withdraw the bid,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in a court filing Wednesday, according to the newspaper.

Both Musk and Altman started OpenAI as a charity in 2015. When Musk left, Altman became the chief executive and the company established a for-profit subsidiary to raise money from investors and Microsoft. Now, Altman is looking to turn the subsidiary into a traditional company, The Wall Street Journal reported.

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“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk reportedly said in a statement when he launched his bid. “We will make sure that happens.”

Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI but cut ties with the company in 2018 after he was unable to persuade its other leaders to put him in charge of a for-profit OpenAI entity or merge the company with Tesla.

“Look, OpenAI is not for sale,” Altman told Bloomberg on the sidelines of the AI Action Summit in Paris on Tuesday. “Elon tries all sorts of things for a long time. This is this week’s episode.”

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“I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor. He’s working hard to raise a lot of money for [his startup] xAI and they are trying to compete with us from a technological perspective from getting the product into the market and I wish he would just compete by building a better product but I think there has been a lot of tactics, you know many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff and now this,” Altman added. “And we’ll try to just put our head down and keep working.”

“No matter what, the nonprofit will continue to be very important, it will continue to drive the mission, it will continue to exist. The Board is looking at lots of options about how to best structure for this next phase, but the nonprofit is not changing or going anywhere,” Altman continued.

In December, OpenAI said on its website that its “Board of Directors is evaluating our corporate structure in order to best support the mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity, with three objectives: Choose a non-profit/for-profit structure that is best for the long-term success of the mission, Make the non-profit sustainable, Equip each arm to do its part.”