On 11 February, reports emerged that Elon Musk and a consortium of investors made an unsolicited offer of $97.4bn to acquire OpenAI, continuing a longstanding feud between Musk and OpenAI founder Sam Altman.
Altman responded with a counter offer to buy Musk’s X platform in a public post on X that read: “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74bn if you want.”
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Parsing Musk’s motivation is often times challenging. His offer to acquire OpenAI could simply be viewed as a battle of the big AI egos in the context of a longstanding feud between Musk and Altman. Both were founding member of OpenAI in 2015, then a nonprofit, open-source organisation focused on ensuring AI advancements for the benefit everyone.
When it became clear that a path to AGI (the point at which machines surpass human intelligence) would require the sums of investments unavailable to a nonprofit, OpenAI forked into part foundation, part business. At this point, a disgruntled Musk left the organisation altogether.
The mercurial Musk has notoriously taken things to heart. His omission from Biden’s White House gathering of US auto makers in August 2021 to discuss the transition to electric vehicles set him on an anti-Biden path. And Musk’s lack of control over the organisation he co-founded, similarly, soured his relationship with both OpenAI and Altman.
More recently, Musk’s reaction to President Trump’s announcement of the $450bn Stargate AI project, which involved OpenAI, was telling. “They don’t actually have the money,” he said goading Sam Altman as he referred to the company’s announced contribution to the project.
But rather than an ongoing battle to dominate AI, Musk may argue that his proposed acquisition of OpenAI is his bid, characteristically as humanity’s saviour, to ensure that AI development should not be a for-profit endeavour. Or at the very least, it should not require the trillions of dollars of investment that current wisdom implied before Chinese upstart DeepSeek, released on 20 January this year, unseated such a premise.
While the giants of US AI continue to spar, competition risk from elsewhere intensifies. The dominance of the US in the global AI race will persist, thanks to significant investments, said GlobalData principal analyst Isabel Al-Dhahir. “However, China has proven to be more advanced in this field than predicted,” said Al-Dhahir referring to DeepSeek’s runaway success which saw the app rise to the top of Apple’s app store.
Musk’s antagonistic relationship with OpenAI demonstrates the ideological chasm that emerged between those wedded to the development of open source AI including Meta, X and Mistral AI, and those developing closed models such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic.
The recent release of DeepSeek, an open-source and open-weight AI platform, promotes the democratisation of AI, according to Al Dhahir. “This development will put pressure on AI companies like OpenAI to adopt an open-source approach to remain competitive,” she said.
It is doubtful that OpenAI could ever return to its full nonprofit status. But an open-source nonprofit would see the organisation remain true to its founding ideals of ensuring that large corporations could not hijack AI development and decide its path for humanity based around their best interests. Or so the story goes.
