Elon Musk Leads Hostile Takeover $97.4 Billion Bid for OpenAI
Elon Musk & Sam Altman Image credit X.com
Sam Altman Turns Down Elon Musk Offer for Open AI
By S Jha
New Delhi, February 11: Sam Altman turned down the takeover bid offer for OpenAI by an Elon Musk-led group. The tech billionaire made an offer of $97.4 billion to buy out OpenAI.
A Musk-led group made the offer to buy out OpenAI from the non-profit group. Altman came on Musk-owned X to reject the offer.
“…no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” Altman posted on X. Musk in reply called Altman “swindler”.
Analysts argued that the hostile takeover bid opens a contentious path for OpenAI. The startup is backed by fund houses who will soon seek to cash out.
Musk had taken control of Twitter, named X afterwards, in a similar fashion. Musk holds contrarian views on artificial intelligence from Altman.
“OpenAI is attempting to transition to a for-profit public benefit corporation. To do so, it needs to take control from the nonprofit board, which needs to be compensated at fair market value,” said Garrison Lovely, a US-based journalist, while tagging a report by the Wall Street Journal on the takeover bid by Musk-led group for OpenAI.
He speculated that Altman may have paid less than $40 billion to transition from non-profit to profit. But Musk-led group now complicated the “plan” of Altman with an offer of more than twice value.
“OAI was maybe going to pay <$40B. Musk just made that a lot more complicated,” added the American journalist.
He reasoned that “if OAI doesn’t complete its for-profit transition in <2 years, investors in the October round can ask for their money back”. Japanese SoftBank is among the fund houses with stakes in OpenAI.
SoftBank has a reputation of forcing startups to go for for-profit, argued analysts. Lovely argued that generally premium paid is 20-30 per cent to for-profit transition,
Musk is well-known for his opposition to Altman. In an interview to independent journalist Tucker Carlson, Musk had said: “I don’t trust OpenAI and Sam Altman.”
“I don’t think we want to have the most powerful AI in the world controlled by someone who is not trustworthy,” Musk had said in the interview.
Musk recently had favourably commented to conspiracy theory around the death of AI whistleblower Suchir Balaji. “This doesn’t seem like a suicide,” Musk had said.
Analysts argued that Musk is seeking to make OpenAI open source. Musk-owned X has unveiled templates of open source AI.
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