While Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and inventor of ChatGPT, was in Paris for the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, Elon Musk went on the offensive. The billionaire advisor to Donald Trump is heading a consortium that has proposed a $97.4 billion takeover of the non-profit company that controls OpenAI. This hostile bid is aimed in particular at preventing Altman from transforming OpenAI into a traditional for-profit company. It comes at a time when Musk's xAI project is, according to experts, lagging far behind those developed by OpenAI, Google and Amazon's Anthropic.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, Musk's advisor Marc Toberoff submitted the offer to OpenAI's board of directors on Monday, February 10. "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good [whose data users can view and use without limit] it once was," said Musk, in a statement provided by Toberoff. "We will make sure that happens."

Altman immediately mocked Elon Musk on X: "No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want," a figure 10 times less than the proposal for OpenAI and four times less than the price Musk paid for the social network. "Scam Altman," Musk immediately replied.

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