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Sam Altman is leaving no room for doubt about his views on an Elon Musk-led bid to take control of OpenAI. In a letter to OpenAI staff Monday, the CEO put the words "bid" and "deal" in scare quotes and said the startup's board has no interest in the offer. "Our structure exists to ensure that no individual can take control of OpenAI," Altman wrote, according to two sources with knowledge of the letter. "Elon runs a competitive AI company, and his actions are not about OpenAI's mission or values." Altman has also told employees that OpenAI's board, which he sits on, has yet to receive an official offer from Musk and the other investors.

Elon Musk has launched a 97.4 billion bid for AI darling OpenAI. The Wall Street Journal reported that a group of investors led by Musk's xAI submitted an unsolicited offer to the company's board of directors on Monday. It's a bid for the non-profit that controls OpenAI's for-profit arm. OpenAI is not a traditional company, and the non-profit structure Sam Altman and others at the company want it to get away from may, in fact, protect it from Musk's offer. There's further drama around all this: Musk had sued OpenAI and Sam Altman for allegedly ditching its non-profit mission around this time last year.

A group of investors led by Elon Musk is offering about 97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit behind OpenAI, escalating a dispute with the artificial intelligence company that Musk helped found a decade ago. Musk and his own AI startup, xAI, and a consortium of investment firms want to take control of the ChatGPT maker and revert it to its original charitable mission as a nonprofit research lab, according to Musk's attorney Marc Toberoff. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the unsolicited bid on Musk's social platform X, saying, "no thank you but we will buy Twitter for 9.74 billion if you want." Musk bought Twitter, now called X, for 44 billion in 2022. Musk and Altman, who together helped start OpenAI in 2015 and later competed over who should lead it, have been in a long-running feud over the startup's direction since Musk resigned from its board in 2018.

Elon Musk has launched a 97.4 billion bid to take control of OpenAI. The Wall Street Journal reports a group of investors led by Musk's xAI submitted an unsolicited offer to the company's board of directors on Monday. The group wants to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI's for-profit arm. When asked for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed Engadget to an X post from CEO Sam Altman. "No thank you but we will buy twitter for 9.74 billion if you want," Altman wrote on the social media platform Musk owns.