The board of directors of OpenAI has officially rejected the proposal of a consortium led by billionaire Elon Musk to acquire the company's assets for $97.4 billion. This is reported in the OpenAI press release.
The consortium's proposal, which includes AI startup xAI, Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and 8VC, is aimed at preventing OpenAI from being reformatted into a commercial structure amid long-standing disagreements between I. Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the further development of OpenAI in the field of AI-technology.
Musk has repeatedly tried to disrupt OpenAI's plans to restructure into a more traditional commercial business and has filed two lawsuits against OpenAI management, alleging that Altman violated the terms of the contract by putting profit above the public good in an effort to develop artificial intelligence.
Musk and S. Altman founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit organization, and in 2023, Musk created the competing AI startup xAI. From the point of view of analysts, in case of successful completion of the transaction, xAI may merge with OpenAI. xAI recently raised $6 billion from investors with a total valuation of $40 billion.
In addition to antitrust issues, a deal of this magnitude will require Musk and his partners to raise huge funds. As part of the latest funding round, the value of OpenAI was estimated at $157 billion.
Currently, OpenAI is trying to transform itself into a commercial organization in order to increase the capital needed to develop new artificial intelligence models. Musk's proposal to acquire OpenAI could significantly complicate the ongoing fundraising of OpenAI and the process of transformation into a commercial corporation, taking into account negotiations with SoftBank Group Corp. on attracting a large-scale round of financing in the amount of up to $300 billion.
Elon Musk is an American billionaire with a fortune of $400 billion. Musk is the CEO of Tesla and the owner of technology and social media company X.
OpenAI is a company in the field of artificial intelligence research and implementation. The company is the developer of OpenAI Gym (for the development and testing of neural network learning algorithms), GPT (a language algorithm for information processing and text generation), DALL·E (a neural network that generates images based on a text description) and ChatGPT (a chatbot based on an improved version of the GPT-3 — GPT-3.5 algorithm).
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