Elon Musk has accused Sam Altman, the OpenAI chief, of being a “swindler” in an escalating public spat between the tech bosses over artificial intelligence.
Altman rejected a $97.4 billion bid led by Musk to buy the non-profit that controls the company — which the pair co-founded in 2015 — and took a swipe at his rival in a post on X.
“No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” Altman said of Musk’s offer, mocking the slump in the value of the social media platform since he bought it for $44 billion in 2022.
The Tesla chief responded by calling Altman a “swindler” and “Scam Altman”. The two tech giants are already in court over the future direction of OpenAI.
Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the offer had been submitted to OpenAI’s board of directors on Monday. It raises the stakes in the fight between Musk and Altman for control of the company behind ChatGPT and the future of artificial intelligence.
Both Musk and Altman have taken prominent roles in President Trump’s new administration while continuing to feud in public.
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The takeover attempt by Musk could upend Altman’s plans to convert OpenAI into a for-profit company spending up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure for a joint venture project, Stargate. Musk has publicly undermined the project, which was unveiled three weeks ago as the first big tech announcement of Trump’s new presidency, claiming Altman and his partners “don’t have the money”.
Musk has filed a string of lawsuits against OpenAI, accusing Altman of betraying the original non-profit mission of the company they co-founded as a charity nearly a decade ago. After Musk left the company and Altman became chief executive in 2019, OpenAI established the for-profit business to raise money from Microsoft and other investors.
Musk has accused OpenAI of working with Microsoft to dominate the development of AI. “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk told the Journal via Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.”
The offer is backed by Musk’s rival intelligence company, xAI, along with a consortium of venture capitalists. The Tesla and Space X boss is backed by Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and 8VC, a venture firm led by the Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, the Journal said. Ari Emanuel, chief executive of the Hollywood talent agency Endeavour, is also backing the bid through his investment fund.
Toberoff said that Musk’s group of investors were prepared to match or exceed any bids higher than their own.
“If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI Inc board of directors are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time,” he said.
The offer follows another public spat in January after Altman appeared alongside Trump at the White House as the president announced the Stargate joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle. Trump hailed it as “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history”, claiming its value could rise to $500 billion.
The president’s announcement was overshadowed, however, when Musk, who is responsible for cutting the federal budget and workforce, could not resist a dig at Altman. “They don’t have the money,” Musk posted on X. “SoftBank has well under $10 billion secured. I have that on good authority.”
Altman and other Stargate investors denied the claim. The row infuriated many White House aides, reviving concerns that Musk will drag his personal feuds with other tech entrepreneurs into the administration, overstepping the bounds of his relationship with the president.
Trump has publicly backed Musk, who spent more than $250 million on his victorious election campaign last year. Musk and his team at the new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) have taken offices in the White House complex as they set about dismantling the federal bureaucracy.
In the three weeks since Trump took office, Doge has moved to shutter several federal agencies, freeze government spending and lay off more than two million civil servants. The efficiency drive faces another barrage of lawsuits and several actions by Musk have been blocked by the courts.
