Elon Musk: Made Silicon Valley hot with the statement that he would buy OpenAI for nearly $100 billion to ‘benefit humanity’ but was countered by OpenAI boss Sam Altman with a sarcastic tone, digging into the pain saying “No…read more

After the noisy lawsuit, the world’s richest billionaire Elon Musk offered to buy OpenAI for nearly $100 billion to ‘benefit humanity’. OpenAI boss Sam Altman responded with sarcasm, poking fun at the Tesla boss’s pain.

The race in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in Silicon Valley is just as hot as the technology war between the US and China after the “earthquake” of DeepSeek. The world’s richest billionaire Elon Musk has just unexpectedly offered to buy OpenAI (owner of the famous chatbot platform ChatGPT) for $97.4 billion.

The offer was made on Monday (February 10), from an alliance led by Elon Musk, including the South African billionaire’s xAI company and a series of other “big guys”, such as: venture capital Valor Equity Partners, Hollywood tycoon Ari Emanuel and 8VC company of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

Billionaire Elon Musk said the deal is to return OpenAI to an open-source platform and benefit humanity.

The purchase proposal comes after Elon Musk and co-founder – former CEO of OpenAI – Sam Altman (1985) had a heated argument over the $500 billion Stargate AI project initiated by US President Donald Trump.

Elon Musk asserted that the project lacked financial resources, while Sam Altman said Musk criticized him for not benefiting.

The project aims to build advanced AI infrastructure in the US, run by OpenAI, with an initial investment of $100 billion and expected to grow to $500 billion within four years.

SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX are the initial funding organizations for the project. In addition, there are a number of technology partners such as ARM, Microsoft, Nvidia, … Elon Musk is not involved in Stargate.

Elon Musk’s announcement to buy OpenAI comes in the context of the billionaire’s poor relationship with OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman. Elon Musk was one of the co-founders and early investors of OpenAI, but left after a power struggle. Musk created his own company xAI to compete directly with Altman’s company.

In August 2024, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against Altman in federal court, alleging that he was deceived by Sam Altman into co-founding OpenAI (a company he co-founded in 2015). Musk accused OpenAI and CEO Altman of putting commercial interests above the public interest.

Responding to the offer to buy OpenAI, Sam Altman fired back with a “sarcastic” tweet: “No thanks, but we will buy Twitter (now X) for $9.74 billion if you want.”

The social network Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk for $44 billion in 2022 and renamed X. X’s current market capitalization is only about $8 billion.

Elon Musk wants to buy OpenAI at a time when CEO Sam Altman is handling many big deals, including the $500 billion Stargate project.

According to Elon Musk, it’s time for OpenAI to return to being an open source platform, focused on safety for the benefit of humanity.

Previously, the technology world was hot at the beginning of the year of the Snake when China’s DeepSeek launched the Deep Seek R1 model and was considered a new “earthquake” in the AI ​​village, likened to a “Sputnik moment”.

Soon after, Alibaba also shook the global AI market with Alibaba Qwen. Two Chinese AI models have “blown away” trillions of dollars in capitalization of American corporations in the past two weeks.

DeepSeek is built on open source code, with very low investment costs, only a fraction of those of American AI technology giants. At the same time, it allows global users to customize and expand features. DeepSeek not only accelerates the spread but also puts pressure on large companies to consider monopoly strategies.

Elon Musk’s proposal also makes it difficult for OpenAI to switch to a profit model.

The DeepSeek earthquake shows that countries and companies without resource advantages can still compete in the AI ​​market. It is also a warning to large companies that rely on financial strength and monopolistic technology. DeepSeek opens up opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses to access AI technology at a lower cost.