Elon Musk owning OpenAI would be a terrible idea. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen | Chris Stokel-Walker

Elon Musk and Sam Altman aren’t exactly the best of friends. The two had a blowout argument over the future direction of OpenAI – the company they came together to found in 2015 – with Altman seemingly content to pursue a for-profit approach and Musk feeling that was forswearing the founding principles of the firm as well as its name. OpenAI couldn’t be open, he reckoned, if it was closed off and trying to make money rather than better humanity.

So it’s no surprise that Musk, who lodged an audacious bid to take over Twitter a little more than two years ago, which ended up with his ownership of the platform now called X, has sought to put a spoiler in two years of near-untrammelled growth for OpenAI.

Musk – who is currently overhauling (to his supporters; “tearing down” to his opponents) the US government to be, as he would describe it, leaner and more efficient while also devastating important programmes such as international aid and cutting-edge scientific research – has lodged a near $100bn bid for OpenAI’s non-profit arm. “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement supplied by the lawyer shepherding his bid. “We will make sure that happens.”

The attempt was rebuffed today. “No thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74bn if you want,” Altman responded. It is hard to believe matters will end there.

To take Musk at his word, the bid is an attempt to wrest back control of OpenAI to ensure it is developing AI for the benefit of society rather than to line the pockets of investors who have pushed the firm’s valuation up to nearly $300bn in the last week. Yet that’s tricky to do, based on past precedent.

What’s most likely is that Musk has seen another opportunity to be a wrecking ball against an opponent who has become a sworn enemy. Musk and Altman have tussled over an on-off lawsuit about the way in which that original founding agreement for OpenAI back in 2015, when Musk bankrolled its creation, was allegedly reneged on. By putting in a bid to take over the non-profit arm, Musk may think he has managed to increase the price Altman will have to pay to roll the non-profit into a profit-making entity. For more than a decade now, Musk has seen a for-profit model for OpenAI as a bad idea, and may think the best way he can try to stop it is to highlight that OpenAI may be selling its non-profit rights on the cheap.

How else to explain the bid, which is significantly less than the overall valuation of OpenAI? With Musk, there are always other options – both frivolous and potentially more serious.

Musk sees himself as a troll, and the idea of lodging a bid just to make headlines and cause trouble could well be at the front of his mind. Take his initial bid to buy Twitter for $43bn, at $54.20 a share, which – with the inclusion of the digits 420 (a reference to a trope for smoking marijuana) – many received as a wink-wink reference to that practice.

The price he’s willing to pay for OpenAI’s non-profit branch, $97.4bn, could be chosen equally carefully in jest. The best theory so far is that it’s a reference to 974 Praf, a character in Iain M Banks’ Look to Windward, part of a sci-fi novel series that Musk has long loved (he has named multiple SpaceX rockets after starships that feature in the series of novels).

That’s the jokey theory. The more sinister one is that the bid is serious – or at least serious enough that Donald Trump might take a fancy to it. Musk has served Trump well as his right-hand man leading the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) with his suite of cost-cutting measures that have echoes of how Musk chopped Twitter to the bone immediately after his purchase was finalised. Trump clearly sees OpenAI as a national champion that ought to be cherished – he put it front and centre of his $500bn project to cement the United States’ supremacy in the AI race announced in the first week of his presidency, Stargate.

Putting a trusted deputy in charge of arguably the most important AI company in the world would make sense for Trump. And making clear his preference for business deals that suit him first – and the country last – is par for the course for the man and his Art of the Deal.

My heart says the bid is nothing more than Musk attempting to cause mischief. But my head says there’s a small chance there could be a twist in the tale that results in Musk’s xAI and OpenAI merging in the future. It’s a concept that would have been inconceivable just a few months ago, but these are no ordinary times. They are extraordinary for sure, and not in a good way.