A 'Musk-led consortium' of investors say they'll withdraw $97.4 billion bid to buy OpenAI—but only if it stays non-profit

Will they? Won't they?

Earlier this week, Elon Musk alongside a group of investors put in an unsolicited bid to purchase the non-profit portion of OpenAI, OpenAI Inc. Now, according to court documents filed on Wednesday, this “Musk-led consortium” says they will withdraw the eye-watering $97.4 billion offer, but only if OpenAI’s board decides against turning this venture into a for-profit organisation (Via TechCrunch).

This latest court filing describes the bid for OpenAI’s governing non-profit publicised on Monday as “serious.” This, despite Musk allegedly telling staff at X over email, “Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even.”

Furthermore, sources told Reuters that OpenAI’s board of directors had apparently not received a formal bid from Musk’s side as of Tuesday. Still, the original bid has arguably succeeded in at least one of its goals: to draw public attention to OpenAI’s reported intention to go for-profit through its latest restructure, and to get us all talking about it—like this.

Whether any amount of public attention will keep OpenAI non-profit still remains to be seen though. The company started as a non-profit, before shifting into a ‘capped-profit’ structure back in 2019. The non-profit part of the company Musk et al allegedly want to buy is what steers the ship of the wider, capped-profit company. The aforementioned restructure intends to go more traditionally for-profit in the form of a public benefit corporation.

OpenAI is presently playing it cool. The original unsolicited bid was dismissed by OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman, who went as far as to write on X, “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want”.

Theoretically, the board could still accept a bid despite this rejection from Altman, though a recent comment suggests that’s unlikely; counsel to OpenAI’s board, Andrew Nussbaum, provided a statement to Bloomberg News which further clarifies the company’s stance: “The nonprofit is not for sale.”

For those unaware, Elon Musk co-founded the company that went on to create ChatGPT alongside Sam Altman back in 2015. Musk then left in 2018, with the company saying at the time his departure was to avoid a potential conflict of interest as Tesla became more interested in AI.

Last year, OpenAI shared redacted emails and DMs suggesting that this split was anything but wholly amicable. Not only that, but these messages also indicate that Musk wanted to push OpenAI towards becoming a for-profit organisation as early as 2017.

Sam Altman recently told Bloomberg Television, “I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor. I wish he would just compete by building a better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics, many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff, now this.” The Musk-backed competition in question is xAI and their boorish chatbot Grok. You know what? I think I’m finally getting it.