PARIS — Elon Musk aims to “slow down a competitor” when the investor group he led put forward a $97.4 billion proposal for control of OpenAI, the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, told CNBC on Tuesday.
Asked how seriously he is taking Musk’s bid, which Altman previously declined in a X social media post, the OpenAI chief said, “Not particularly.”
“I think it’s to slow down a competitor and catch up with his thing, but I don’t really know … to the degree anybody does,” Altman added, in response to another reporter’s questions on the sidelines of the AI Action Summit in Paris.
Musk is leading a group of investors in offering to buy control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion, CNBC confirmed on Monday. The offer is for the nonprofit that oversees the artificial intelligence startup behind ChatGPT.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said, adding that he submitted an offer on Monday.
Musk has his own AI company called xAI which is behind the chatbot Grok.
CNBC has reached out to Toberoff, Tesla and X for comment.
‘I’m not the one who tweeted funding secured’
Altman also dismissed a suggestion from Musk earlier this year that OpenAI lacks the money to contribute to President Donald Trump’s multibillion-dollar Stargate joint venture aimed at investing in U.S. computing infrastructure needed to train and run frontier AI models.
The project was announced last month. OpenAI at the time said Stargate would “begin deploying $100 billion immediately.” However, Musk questioned whether the companies involved in the initiative had sufficient capital to finance it, stating “they don’t actually have the money.”
Speaking on Tuesday, Altman took a swipe at Musk, saying: “I’m not the one who tweeted funding secured. I just actually try to show up and build.”
The remark was a reference to Musk’s controversial claim in 2018 that he had “funding secured” to take his electric car firm Tesla private at $420 per share.
The infamous tweet became the subject of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission because of resulting fluctuations in Tesla’s share price. Musk eventually reached a settlement with the SEC in which he and Tesla each agreed to pay $20 million in fines, with the billionaire also giving up chairmanship of the company.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy and Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
