Elon Musk among investors seeking to buy Chat GPT paren't company

Elon Musk is among investors who are bidding USD 97.4 billion to take over OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT.

This marks a new twist in the ongoing rivalry between Musk owner of X and world’s richest men and Open AI chief executive Sam Altman over the future of the start-up at the centre of the AI boom.

According to the billionaire’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, the investors submitted their bid for all assets of the tech giant company on Monday.

In a perceive response to the billionaire, Altman on Monday posted on X saying: "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want."

Reuters reports that Musk cofounded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 as a nonprofit organisation, but left before the company took off. He founded the competing AI startup xAI in 2023.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of tech and social media company X, is a close ally of President Donald Trump.

He has spent nearly half a billion dollars to help elect Trump, and leads the Department of Government Efficiency, a new arm of the White House tasked with radically shrinking the federal bureaucracy.

Musk recently criticized a $500 billion OpenAI-led project announced by Trump at the White House.

OpenAI is widely credited with helping bring artificial intelligence tools into the mainstream and sparking huge investment in the sector.

Altman is said to be restructuring the company to become a for-profit entity, stripping it of its non-profit board - a move Musk argues means the company has abandoned its founding mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity.

But OpenAI argues its transition into a for-profit firm is required to secure the money needed for developing the best artificial intelligence models.

The bid to take over OpenAI bid is being backed by Musk's AI company xAI, as well as several private equity firms, including Baron Capital Group and Valor Management.

"It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens," Musk said in a statement.

The offer tabled at $97.4bn is much lower than the $157bn the company was valued at in its latest funding round in October last year. Talks over a further funding round reportedly value it now at $300bn.

In a statement, Mr Toberoff said the consortium would be "prepared to consider matching or exceeding" any potential higher bid.

"As the co-founder of OpenAI and the most innovative and successful tech industry leader in history, Musk is the person best positioned to protect and grow OpenAI's technology," Musk's attorney added on his behalf and other investors.

The creator of ChatGPT is also teaming up with another US tech giant, Oracle, along with a Japanese investment firm and an Emirati sovereign wealth fund to build $500bn of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US.

The new company, called The Stargate Project, was announced at the White House by President Donald Trump who billed it "the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history" and said it would help keep "the future of technology" in the US.

Musk, despite being a top advisor to Trump, has claimed the venture does not "actually have the money" it has pledged to invest, though he has also not provided any details or substantiation for the comments.