Investing.com-- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday rejected a reported $97 billion bid from Elon Musk to acquire the artificial intelligence start-up.
"No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want," Altman said in a post on X, the social media website formerly known as Twitter.
Musk responded to Altman’s post by calling him a "swindler." The Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO ramped up his rhetoric against OpenAI and Altman on Monday, calling him "Scam Altman" in another post.
According to late-breaking reports from the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Musk assembled a consortium of investors and was offering to acquire the ChatGPT maker for $97.4 billion. Musk plans to merge OpenAI into his newly-formed AI company xAI.
Marc Toberoff, who is Musk’s attorney, said the bid was presented to OpenAI’s board on Monday, the WSJ report said.
Musk has been a vocal opponent of OpenAI’s Altman’s plan to turn the company into a for-profit entity. The two co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit. After Musk left the company in 2019, it created a for-profit arm that raised money from Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and others. Altman is working on converting the subsidiary into a traditional company while separating the nonprofit, which would retain equity in the newly formed for-profit.
"It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.”
OpenAI most recently was said to be worth $300 billion, based on new potential funding from SoftBank (TYO:9984).
OpenAI and SoftBank announced an aggressive $500 billion AI project, Stargate, with President Trump in January.
Ambar Warrick contributed to this report.