OpenAI shouldn’t accept Elon Musk’s $97 billion bid to buy it

Let’s say you own one of the most valuable homes in a lush, gated community that has been earmarked as a future point of growth for decades to come. One day, a letter appears in your mailbox, offering to buy your property for between a third and two-thirds of its value on the open market.

On the face of it, you should turn it down. But the person offering to buy it owns every house in the estate, and runs the HOA. They’re also friends with the police chief and the fire department. So you have to think carefully.

That’s the situation OpenAI CEO Sam Altman finds himself in today as an Elon Musk-led group launches an audacious bid to buy the nonprofit arm of OpenAI, the hottest ticket in tech, for $97.4 billion. The bid, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, is undoubtedly a cheeky one. OpenAI was last valued at $157 billion late last year when it last went into the market to seek investment. And just this week, SoftBank, the Japanese investment company, valued it at $260 billion.

That makes Musk’s bid to take over the company a cut-price one, worth significantly less than the going market rate. The idea that OpenAI—which has spent the past year or more in an on-again, off-again court case against Musk over an argument dating back a decade to the latter’s involvement in setting up the AI company as a nonprofit—would accept the offer for the nonprofit arm seems preposterous.

Yet, we are in an era where Elon Musk has emerged as a right-hand man for Donald Trump. Things are no longer normal in politics or business, and Trump sees OpenAI as a strategically important business for the United States. (For proof, just look at his recently announced AI project, the Stargate Project.)

“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement made through his attorney announcing the bid. “We will make sure that happens.”

We’ll soon find out whether that’s the bluster of a businessman who has long made audacious bets (many of which have paid off), or the commentary of someone whose quasi-governmental position allows him to exert power. For now at least, Sam Altman appears to be treating it like the joke it is. “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” he quickly tweeted.

no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 10, 2025

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