Elon Musk’s Attempt to Acquire OpenAI: Sam Altman Refuses, But Proposes an Alternative with Twitter

Musk’s legal representative, Marc Toberoff, officially presented this unsolicited bid to the board of OpenAI on Monday.

This unexpected bid complicates Sam Altman’s plans for OpenAI’s trajectory, which included transitioning to a for-profit entity and investing up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure via a new initiative known as Stargate. The two are already embroiled in legal disputes concerning OpenAI’s future direction.

Musk articulated, “It’s time for OpenAI to revert to its origins as an open-source and safety-oriented organization dedicated to the greater good. We pledge to ensure that vision is realized.”

This unsolicited takeover attempt emerges as OpenAI is progressively transforming from a nonprofit model under Sam Altman’s leadership. Elon Musk, who was instrumental in financing OpenAI’s inception, departed the organization after being denied authority over its management.

The meteoric rise of OpenAI began following its public release of the ChatGPT-3 chatbot, heralding the dawn of large language models and a groundbreaking era of generative AI.

Controversially, Musk has recently initiated legal action against OpenAI, deriding it as “ClosedAI.” Alongside this, he has launched xAI, a rival artificial intelligence venture that learns from interactions with X (formerly known as Twitter).

In response to these developments, Altman humorously rejected Musk’s offer in a post, indicating that OpenAI would be interested in acquiring Twitter for a mere $9.74 billion—equivalent to 10% of Musk’s bold offer for OpenAI.

A noteworthy response from X’s user @greg16676935420 captured the moment with the phrase, “Sharts fired,” punctuating the escalating drama.

In other developments, ChatGPT has launched its o3-mini “cost-effective reasoning” model and is nearing the completion of its first custom chip design.

Additionally, Google presented Gemini 2.0 Flash to showcase advancements in reasoning models, while Perplexity made Gemini 2.0 Flash accessible to Pro subscribers, and Microsoft provided OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model free to Copilot users.

At the same time, ChatGPT has surpassed DeepSeek in the App Store rankings, with usage levels reaching an unprecedented high. Although there was some criticism regarding the redesign of the ChatGPT app, its engagement remains strong. OpenAI has also taken cues from DeepSeek to unveil the o3-mini’s “chain of thought” approach, albeit with less transparency.

Furthermore, OpenAI has rolled out and released significant deep research features for ChatGPT Pro users following the underwhelming performance of its operator agent feature. This new deep research tool automates comprehensive online searches and synthesizes findings into a report based on user prompts.

Deep Research represents OpenAI’s latest agent designed to work independently. By inputting a prompt, ChatGPT will gather, analyze, and curate information from hundreds of online sources to compile a detailed analysis akin to that of a research analyst. Powered by a variant of the forthcoming OpenAI o3 model—optimized for web utilization and data evaluation—it employs advanced reasoning techniques to explore, interpret, and analyze vast volumes of text, images, and PDFs while adjusting its strategy in response to newly encountered information.

This capacity to synthesize existing knowledge is fundamental to generating new insights. Consequently, deep research is a pivotal advancement toward realizing the broader ambition of developing AGI, which aims to innovate novel scientific research.

Such capabilities certainly seem to justify the eye-watering $97.4 billion valuation offered by Musk’s consortium, which is reportedly ready to outbid any rival offers for control over OpenAI.