An investor consortium led by Elon Musk offered $ 97.4 billion to take Openai, the Chatgpt manufacturer.
The billionaire’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, confirmed that he had submitted the offer for “all the assets” of the technological company to its board of directors on Monday.
The offer is the last turn of a long -standing battle between Musk, the richest man in the world to the American president Donald Trump, and opened Sam Altman, Director General of AI, on the future of the Start-up in the center of the AI arrow.
In response to the offer, Altman Posted on Musk X’s social media platform: “No thanks but we will buy Twitter for $ 9.74 billion if you wish.”
OPENAI is largely credited with having helped to provide artificial intelligence tools in the dominant current and to arouse enormous investments in the sector.
Musk and Altman co-founded the start-up in 2015 as a non-profit business, but the relationship has embarked since the boss of Tesla and X left the company in 2018.
Altman would be to restructure the company to become a for -profit entity, stripping it of its non -profit board of directors – a musk move means that the company has abandoned its founding mission to develop AI for the benefit of the humanity.
But Openai maintains that its transition to a for -profit company is necessary to guarantee the money necessary to develop the best models of artificial intelligence.
The offer to take over Openai is supported by the AI company of Musk Xai, as well as several investment capital companies, including Baron Capital Group and Valor Management.
“It is time for Openai to return to the open source force and focused on good. We will make sure that this happens,” Musk said in a statement.
The offer filed at $ 97.4 billion is much lower than $ 157 billion in which the company was estimated in its last round of funding in October of last year. Discussions on another financing tour would now have estimated this at $ 300 billion.
In a statement, Tuberoff said that the consortium would be “ready to consider matching or exceeding the higher offer”.
“As an Openai co-founder and the most innovative and successful technology industry leader in history, Musk is the best placed to protect and develop Openai technology,” added Musk’s lawyer on his behalf and other investors.
The Chatgpt creator is also associated with another giant of American technology, Oracle, as well as a Japanese investment company and a sovereign wealth fund Emirati to build $ 500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure -Unis.
The new company, called The Stargate projectwas announced to the White House by President Donald Trump who billed him “the biggest infrastructure project from AI from afar in history” and said that it would help keep “the future of technology “In the United States.
Musk, although he was a Trump’s high level advisor, said the company did not really have the money “that he is committed to investing, although he did not have No longer provided with details or justification for comments.
