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OpenAI's Altman dismisses Musk's offer as a tactic to

disrupt

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Altman says OpenAI plans to reject offer to maintain

mission

focus

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Musk's lawyer says offer was sent to OpenAI outside

counsel on

Monday

By Krystal Hu, Manuel Ausloos

NEW YORK/PARIS, Feb 11 (Reuters) - OpenAI's board of

directors has not yet received a formal bid from a consortium

led by Elon Musk, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters

on Tuesday, adding to the confusion over an unsolicited attempt

to take control of the world's most prominent AI company.

A day after Musk publicized a bid to offer $97.4 billion to buy

the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, the two sides were still at

odds over what exactly happened to the formal bid.

Musk's lawyer, Marc Toberoff, told Reuters that he sent the

offer by email on Monday to OpenAI's outside counsel at

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

A source close to OpenAI's board said the board and its

outside law firms had not received any formal bid from the Musk

consortium as of Tuesday afternoon.

The nonprofit that controls the ChatGPT maker is not for sale,

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Reuters on Tuesday when asked about

Musk's offer to buy it. The offer by the Musk-led consortium

came amid the billionaire's fight to block the artificial

intelligence startup from transitioning to a for-profit firm.

"I have nothing to say. I mean, it's ridiculous," Altman

said on the sidelines of an AI summit in Paris when asked about

the offer.

"The company is not for sale. It's another one of his

tactics to try to mess with us," Altman said, referring to Musk.

In an internal message to OpenAI employees on Monday, Altman

said the board, though it had not officially reviewed the offer,

planned to reject it based on the interest of OpenAI's mission.

Musk cofounded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 as a nonprofit,

but left before the company took off due to a disagreement over

the company's direction and funding sources with Altman and

other co-founders. In 2023, he launched the competing AI

startup, xAI.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of technology company

X, is a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump. He leads the

Department of Government Efficiency, a new arm of the White

House tasked with radically shrinking the federal bureaucracy.

OpenAI, in the process of raising $40 billion, is also

seeking to transition into a for-profit from a nonprofit entity,

which it says is required to secure the capital needed for

developing the best AI models. The complicated transition

involves putting a price tag on OpenAI's non-profit control of

the for-profit arm.

Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings has said she is

reviewing OpenAI's proposed changes to ensure the company is

"adhering to its specific charitable purposes for the benefit of

the public beneficiaries, as opposed to the commercial or

private interests of OpenAI's directors or partners."

Legal experts said Musk's bid complicates the fair value

held by OpenAI, particularly regarding charitable assets in its

complicated corporate conversion, meaning the price it needs to

pay in exchange for the nonprofit to give up control.

"It does help set a price point for the thinking about the

valuation of the nonprofit assets," Robert Weissman,

co-president of Public Citizen, the consumer rights watchdog,

told Reuters. "If it were to occur as proposed, the regulators

have a duty to ensure that if there's a selloff of assets to a

for-profit entity, that fair market value is obtained."