So this happened last week and I'm still sort of chewing on it: a group led by Elon Musk put in an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, and Sam Altman responded on Twitter (I refuse to call it X, sorry, some habits from 2011 die hard) with "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want." Musk's reply was one word: "Swindler."
I laughed out loud at my desk when I saw that. My cat did not appreciate it.
On Friday, OpenAI's board chairman Bret Taylor put out a statement saying the board had unanimously rejected the offer and that "OpenAI is not for sale." Which, fine, of course they rejected it, nobody thought a $97.4 billion drive-by bid from a rival lab's CEO was going to actually close. But the specificity of Altman's counter-number is the part I can't stop thinking about. $9.74 billion is exactly a tenth of Musk's number. That's not a real offer, its a math joke dressed up as a business headline, and somehow it worked, because every outlet ran it verbatim.
I've watched Musk and Altman snipe at each other for years now on this blog in one form or another, going back to when Musk first walked away from OpenAI's board around 2018 over disagreements about direction (and, depending who you believe, over losing an internal argument about who should run the place). This is just the latest round. But it lands different now that both of them are running the two most talked-about AI labs on the planet instead of one guy running a lab and the other guy tweeting about it from the sidelines.
Here's my actual opinion, since I try not to just report stuff on here: I think Musk's bid was never really about buying OpenAI. His lawsuit against OpenAI (the one arguing the nonprofit-to-for-profit conversion violates the terms he originally donated under) has been limping along for months, and a headline-grabbing $97.4 billion offer is a pretty efficient way to put a number in front of a judge and the press at the same time. It sets a marker. If OpenAI's for-profit arm eventually gets valued at, say, $40 billion in some future funding round, Musk gets to point at his own offer and say the nonprofit assets were sold for less than a credible buyer was willing to pay. Whether that argument holds up legally I have zero idea, I am not a lawyer and this blog has never pretended otherwise.
What I keep coming back to is how personal all of this still is between the two of them, a decade after they were supposedly on the same side. Altman's joke wasn't just a joke, it was needling Musk specifically about the Twitter purchase, which by most accounts has not exactly been a triumphant financial win. That's a very pointed way to say no thanks.
Anyway. I don't think this bid goes anywhere and I'd bet real money OpenAI is still OpenAI a year from now, not some Musk-controlled entity. But I do think we're going to keep getting these little eruptions every few months as long as both companies are racing each other and both founders have this much unresolved history and this many Twitter followers. It's become its own genre of tech news at this point, the billionaire spat that's dressed up as a corporate maneuver. Half the coverage of it this week barely mentioned what OpenAI's nonprofit structure even controls or why that structure exists in the first place, which I think is the actually interesting and complicated part, but nobody wants to write eight hundred words about nonprofit governance when they can run "SWINDLER" as a pull quote instead.
I get it. I ran the pull quote too, right up top. Glass houses.
One last thing, unrelated but it's been sitting in my browser tabs all week: does anyone else feel like every AI story right now gets compared back to DeepSeek from a few weeks ago, like it's the reference point for everything now? I want one week where the AI news cycle isn't measured against a single Chinese lab's release. Probably not this month though.