'Swindler...': Elon Musk makes $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI, Sam Altman fires back with Twitter takeover jibe

A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk made a $97.4 billion bid to acquire OpenAI’s non-profit parent, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The unsolicited offer, which puts a spanner in the works for OpenAI's plans to become a for-profit firm, was reportedly submitted to OpenAI's board through Musk's attorney Marc Toberoff.

Rejecting the offer, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said, “No thank you but we will buy twitter (now X) for $9.74 billion if you want.” Altman’s post on X drew quick retort from the world’s richest man. Musk replied calling OpenAI CEO “swindler”.

The Tesla and X CEO also shared a video of Altman, calling the OpenAI CEO “Scam Altman”.

This comes days after China’s DeepSeek came up with a model that is claimed to be on par with OpenAI's advanced ChatGPT 4 AI model. In just about a month, DeepSeek's AI model R1 topped Apple's App Store downloads, triggering a selloff in stocks of key chip manufacturers and wiping off more than $1 trillion of their market cap. Nvidia alone shed more than $600 billion in market cap.

Last month, OpenAI announced the massive Stargate project, a $100 billion initiative aimed at building advanced AI infrastructure in the US. Backed by Microsoft and SoftBank, the project focuses on developing next-generation data centres equipped with cutting-edge semiconductor technology to power future AI models.

Earlier in February, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Ashwini Vaishnaw said that OpenAI plans to collaborate with India on the entire AI stack following his discussion with CEO Sam Altman in Delhi. For OpenAI, India is the second biggest market after the US.

During his India visit, Altman also clarified his past remarks on India’s ability to build large language models (LLM), asserting that his comments had been “taken out of context”. “We are now in a world where we have made incredible progress with distillation. Models are still not cheap, but they are doable. India should be a leader there, of course,” Altman said. The OpenAI CEO acknowledged that while the costs of training AI models will continue to rise, the long-term economic value and returns will also increase.