OpenAI’s Sam Altman rejects $97.4 billion takeover offer and throws shade at Elon Musk
Sam Altman rejected the $97 billion offer (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Sam Altman, the co-founder of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, has reiterated that the tech giant is not for sale, while throwing shade at Elon Musk who had led group of investors offering more than $97 billion (£78.5 billion) for the company.
Musk, the owner of X/Twitter and “first buddy” to US president Donald Trump, made a bid for “all assets” of the tech company on Monday (10 February), his lawyer Marc Toberoff said.
In October, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion (£5.3 billion) in its latest funding round, giving the company a value in the region of $157 billion (£126.5 billion).
In response to Musk’s offer, Altman wrote on X: “No thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion (£7.85 billion), if you want.”
no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 10, 2025
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for approximately $44 billion (£34.8 billion) and since then has courted controversy as the social media platform removed hate-speech protections, reinstated controversial users – not least, Trump – and told cautious advertisers, worried that their products might appear next to something they found unsavoury, to “go f**k themselves”.
Recent estimates by investment giant Fidelity suggest X may have lost close to 80 per cent of its value since Musk’s takeover, although other firms could value the company differently.
Speaking to Sky News at the AI Action Summit, in Paris, Altman repeated that he was “happy to buy Twitter”.
And he told Axios: “There [have] been versions of Elon trying to somehow take control of OpenAI for a long time, so here’s this week’s episode: OpenAI is not for sale. 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.”
Toberoff said the Musk-led consortium would be “prepared to consider matching or exceeding” any higher bids for the company, the BBC reported.
Sam Altman’s net worth
According to Forbes, Sam Altman’s net worth is $1.2 billion. It’s believed he has no equity in OpenAI, and instead owes his wealth to his investments, including stakes in Stripe, Reddit and nuclear fusion firm Helion.
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