Sam Altman: OpenAI is not for sale, even for Elon Musk’s $97 billion offer

On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly rejected an unsolicited Elon Musk-led attempt to purchase OpenAI for $97.4 billion. The Wall Street Journal reports that the offer was backed by Musk's own company, xAI, in addition to several investors in Musk's other businesses.

After the Wall Street Journal broke news of the purchase offer Monday afternoon, Altman shifted the offer's decimal point in a joke publicly posted on X, saying, "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want."

Musk—who recently changed his X name to "Harry Bōlz" as a reference to the nickname for a teenage member of his DOGE group that is currently embroiled in what some legal experts consider a constitutional crisis for the US federal government—replied to Altman on X with one word: "Swindler."

Screenshot of Sam Altman X post saying, "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want" and Musk's reply of "Swindler." — A screenshot of the recent Altman-Musk exchange. Credit: X

Altman clarified his position in several media appearances on Tuesday morning, characterizing Musk's latest salvo as another one of his attempts to throw a wrench in the works at OpenAI.

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"OpenAI is not for sale," Altman told Ina Fried at Axios. "OpenAI's mission is not for sale—to say nothing of the fact that a competitor who is not able to beat us in the market and instead is just trying to say, 'I'm gonna buy this,' with total disregard for the mission is a likely path there."

A brief history of Musk vs. Altman

The beef between Musk and Altman goes back to 2015, when the pair partnered (with others) to co-found OpenAI as a nonprofit. Musk cut ties with the company in 2018 but watched from the sidelines as OpenAI became a media darling in 2022 and 2023 following the launch of ChatGPT and then GPT-4.

In July 2023, Musk created his own OpenAI competitor, xAI (maker of Grok). Since then, Musk has become a frequent legal thorn in Altman and OpenAI's side, at times suing both OpenAI and Altman personally, claiming that OpenAI has strayed from its original open source mission—especially after reports emerged about Altman's plans to transition portions of OpenAI into a for-profit company, something Musk has fiercely criticized.

Musk initially sued the company and Altman in March 2024, claiming that OpenAI’s alliance with Microsoft had broken its agreement to make a major breakthrough in AI "freely available to the public." Musk withdrew the suit in June 2024, then revived it in August 2024 under similar complaints.

Musk and Altman have been publicly trading barbs frequently on X and in the press over the past few years, most recently when Musk criticized Altman's $500B "Stargate" AI infrastructure project announced last month.

This morning, when asked on Bloomberg Television if Musk’s move comes from personal insecurity about xAI, Altman replied, "Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity."

"I don’t think he’s a happy guy. I feel for him," he added.