Deal or No deal Sam Altman: OpenAI is not for sale, even for Elon Musks $97 billion offer Altman responds with pithy offer to buy Twitter for $9.74 billion. Benj Edwards Feb 11, 2025 11:55 am | 112 Credit: hapabapa / Feverpitched / Benj Edwards Credit: hapabapa / Feverpitched / Benj Edwards Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreOn 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."Muskwho recently changed his X name to "Harry Blz" 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 governmentreplied to Altman on X with one word: "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."OpenAI is not for sale," Altman told Ina Fried at Axios. "OpenAI's mission is not for saleto 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. AltmanThe 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 missionespecially 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 OpenAIs 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 Musks move comes from personal insecurity about xAI, Altman replied, "Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity.""I dont think hes a happy guy. I feel for him," he added.Benj EdwardsSenior AI ReporterBenj EdwardsSenior AI Reporter Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC. 112 Comments