Musk wants to withdraw takeover bid if OpenAI remains non-profit organization
The 100 billion US dollar offer for OpenAI is Elon Musk's latest attempt to force the company's non-profit status. He has confirmed this.
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Elon Musk's consortium will withdraw the almost 100 billion US dollar takeover bid for the non-profit organization behind OpenAI if the AI company abandons the change to its corporate structure. This was assured by Musk's lawyers in a statement to the court. The court must decide on Elon Musk's attempt to prevent the planned conversion of OpenAI into a for-profit company. "If the Board of Directors of OpenAI is willing to preserve the mission of the organization and remove the 'For Sale' sign from the assets by stopping the conversion, Musk will withdraw his offer," the document states.
Lawsuit against a competitor
By filing with the US Federal District Court in California in Musk v. Altman (4:24-cv-04722), Musk's group now confirms that the takeover bid is just the latest attempt to prevent the abandonment of OpenAI's public benefit objective. The company responsible for ChatGPT is committed to developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity and not to maximize profits. Musk wants to ensure that this remains the case. With the AI company xAI, the billionaire also owns a direct competitor to OpenAI. Together with investors, he has offered 97.4 billion US dollars for control of OpenAI.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has rejected the takeover bid as "ridiculous", saying that because he remains committed to the common good, the board of directors can simply reject it. However, this will make the transformation into a profit-oriented company more difficult. According to media reports, it was planned that OpenAI would grant the remaining non-profit organizations a 25 percent share and pay them out in return. With a total value of around 160 billion US dollars, that would be around 40 billion. The large difference to the offer from Musk & Co. could therefore raise specific questions as to whether the non-profit organization is being fobbed off with too little money as part of this conversion.
(mho)
