Elon Musk is willing to withdraw his bid to take control of OpenAI, but there’s a catch.
In a court filing on Wednesday, Musk’s lawyers stated that if OpenAI’s board agrees to halt its conversion to a for-profit entity, Musk would withdraw his takeover attempt.
The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The world’s richest person’s lawyers reportedly said “if OpenAI board is prepared to preserve the charity’s mission and stipulate to take the ‘for sale’ sign off its assets by halting its conversion, Musk will withdraw the bid.”
However, going by OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman’s public statements, he simply isn’t interested.
Altman responded to the move with a cheeky offer to “buy Twitter for $9.74 billion,” highlighting the fact that he isn’t close to changing course.
This battle of wills between Musk and Altman isn’t new. Musk, who initially co-founded OpenAI as a charity with Altman in 2015, has been critical of the company’s shift towards commercialization and close ties with behemoths like Microsoft.
According to Musk, OpenAI’s transformation involves concentrating AI power in Microsoft’s hands.
OpenAI has mapped out ambitious plans, like spending $500 billion on AI infrastructure through Stargate — its joint-venture with Microsoft and SoftBank.
As Musk challenges, Altman has ramped up shipping at OpenAI.
The company has launched two AI agents — Operator and Deep Research — in quick succession. It gave free access to the base o3-mini model of its new reasoning line o3.
OpenAI earlier rolled its Search functionality to all users, without needing to log in. Altman’s company has also laid out plans for new product launches, including GPT-4.5 and GPT-5.
This legal tussle isn’t just about two tech giants jostling for dominance; it’s about the evolving ethos of AI.
A battle is brewing between closed-source and open-source AI. As OpenAI changed course, others like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta sweeped in to bridge the gap.
Meta’s Llama series of models are open-source and Zuckerberg has on multiple occasions stated that he believes in commercialization of apps built on top of the open-source foundational models and such an approach would benefit his company as well.
DeepSeek recently made waves with its R1 open-source model as well, in a way that delivered more than a few jitters, not just to OpenAI but the entire U.S. tech industry.