Sam Altman declares OpenAI “not for sale” after Elon Musk-led takeover bid worth over $97 billion
Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, has rejected a $97.4 billion takeover bid from a group of investors that includes his fierce competitor, Elon Musk.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has declared that the AI research organisation is “not for a sale” following a $97 billion acquisition bid from a consortium of investors spearheaded by Elon Musk.
Altman was speaking to Sky News at the AI Action Summit in Paris, after having first rejected the offer on X, stating “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $97.4 billion dollars if you want”.
Altman and Musk share a complicated history. The pair co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit company but later disagreed on the startup's pathway. The Tesla and X boss resigned from the firm – known for the widely used ChatGPT – in 2018 and has since initiated several lawsuits against OpenAI, among them claiming it has altered its mission.
Marc Toberoff, Musk’s attorney, said of the takeover 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.”
It’s not the first time Altman has made headlines in recent days. He also attracted attention for a blog dated 9 February 2025 in which he wrote that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – where AI rivals or even surpasses human intelligence – is “coming into view”, and that its arrival will likely cause major disruption.
“The world will not change all at once; it never does,” Altman stated in the lengthy post. "Life will go on mostly the same in the short run, and people in 2025 will mostly spend their time in the same way they did in 2024… But the future will be coming at us in a way that is impossible to ignore, and the long-term changes to our society and economy will be huge.”
The Open AI boss further wrote that although AI is expected to significantly reduce the cost of many goods, it may also be commandeered by authoritarian regimes “to control their population through mass surveillance and loss of autonomy”.
“We expect the impact of AGI to be uneven,” he envisioned.
Altman’s blog comes just three months after the exit of a former OpenAI safety officer, who raised alarms about the trajectory of AGI advancement. “Honestly I’m pretty terrified by the pace of AI development these days,” shared Steven Adler in a series of posts on X.
If Altman’s blog conclusion is anything to go by, then that development continues at breakneck speed.
“Anyone in 2035 should be able to marshal the intellectual capacity equivalent to everyone in 2025,” the CEO closed. “Everyone should have access to unlimited genius to direct however they can imagine.”
.jpeg){kind=avatar}
