Musk says he'll withdraw $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI if ChatGPT maker remains nonprofit

Musk talks AI investment

Photo: AP

FILE - The OpenAI logo appears on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen with random binary data, March 9, 2023, in Boston. 

Elon Musk says he will abandon his $97.4 billion offer to buy the nonprofit behind OpenAI if the ChatGPT maker drops its plan to convert into a for-profit company.

“If OpenAI, Inc.’s Board is prepared to preserve the charity’s mission and stipulate to take the ‘for sale’ sign off its assets by halting its conversion, Musk will withdraw the bid,” lawyers for the billionaire said in a filing to a California court on Wednesday.

“Otherwise, the charity must be compensated by what an arms-length buyer will pay for its assets.”

Musk and a group of investors made their offer earlier this week, in the latest twist to a dispute with the artificial intelligence company that he helped found a decade ago.

OpenAI is controlled by a nonprofit board bound to its original mission of safely building better-than-human AI for public benefit. Now a fast-growing business, it unveiled plans last year to formally change its corporate structure.

Musk and his own AI startup, xAI, and a consortium of investment firms want to acquire OpenAI so they can revert it back to its original charitable mission as a nonprofit research lab.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the unsolicited bid in a post on social media and told questioners at a Paris summit on AI that the company is not for sale.

Musk and Altman helped start OpenAI in 2015 and later competed over who should lead it. They've been in a long-running feud over the startup’s direction since Musk resigned from its board in 2018.