Elon Musk offers $97.4B to buy OpenAI

Silicon Valley's bitterest feud just took a nine-figure turn.

Just when you thought the legal sparring between Elon Musk and OpenAI couldn't get more personal, Musk dropped a massive offer on the table. A consortium led by Musk has submitted an unsolicited bid to purchase OpenAI, with figures landing between $97.4 billion and $97.6 billion. The news was confirmed to The Wall Street Journal on Monday by Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff.

Musk makes an unsolicited play

The bid marks a dramatic escalation in Musk's long-running war with co-founder Sam Altman. The two launched OpenAI alongside others back in 2015 as a research nonprofit, but Musk walked away and filed an injunction in 2024 to block the company from transitioning into a for-profit entity.

Musk's AI company, xAI, is formally tied to the bid, sparking immediate speculation that any deal would merge the two operations.

Musk is framing the buyout as a rescue mission for OpenAI's founding mission. He told The Journal via his attorney that it is time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was, adding, we will make sure that happens.

In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Musk touted xAI's Grok model as proof of concept, arguing that his current startup follows the principles promised to OpenAI by open-sourcing code and respecting content creators.

Altman claps back with a 90% discount

Altman did not waste time crafting a formal diplomatic rejection. Instead, he took the fight directly to Musk's home turf on X.

No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want, Altman wrote on Monday morning.

That was a targeted jab at Musk's 2022 leveraged buyout of Twitter, which closed at $44 billion. Altman basically dismissed the near-hundred-billion-dollar offer as a joke while mocking the steep markdown of Musk’s social media investment.

Why it matters

Nobody realistically expects OpenAI's board to accept this offer. We see this less as a serious M&A transaction and more as an aggressive legal and PR siege against Altman's restructuring plans.

By putting a specific $97.4 billion figure on paper, Musk puts OpenAI in a tricky corner. If the board rejects the deal outright, Musk can argue in his ongoing lawsuits that leadership is ignoring its fiduciary duties and deliberately walking away from a massive payout that could fund its original nonprofit charter.

It is a clever leverage play that also puts Musk’s rival firm, xAI, right in the center of the frontier AI narrative. But it also highlights the messy reality of AI governance right now. The race for artificial general intelligence is no longer just about breakthroughs in compute and transformers; it is increasingly playing out as high-stakes corporate warfare between billionaire founders.