OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Elon Musk is “probably just trying to slow us down” with his bid to purchase the company, insisting on Tuesday that it is not for sale.
Altman, who spoke to Bloomberg on the sidelines of the AI Action Summit in Paris following Musk’s unsolicited bid of $97.4 billion to take over OpenAI, also said that Musk is probably living his whole life “from a position of insecurity” and that “I don’t think he’s like a happy person, I do feel for him.”
“Look, OpenAI is not for sale,” Altman told Bloomberg. “Elon tries all sorts of things for a long time. This is this week’s episode.”
“I think he is probably just trying to slow us down. He obviously is a competitor. He’s working hard to raise a lot of money for [his startup] xAI and they are trying to compete with us from a technological perspective from getting the product into the market and I wish he would just compete by building a better product but I think there has been a lot of tactics, you know many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff and now this,” Altman added. “And we’ll try to just put our head down and keep working.”
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When asked if he is concerned about Musk’s proximity to President Donald Trump and his ability to potentially influence him regarding U.S. policy on AI, Altman said “Maybe I should, but not particularly.
“I try to just wake up and think about how we are going to make our technology better,” he also said.
Marc Toberoff, Musk’s attorney, said he submitted the bid on Monday to the board of directors at OpenAI to purchase the company, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Altman also responded to Musk’s offer on X, saying, “no thank you but we may buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
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Musk turned to X and fired back quickly, “Swindler,” and later wrote, “Never a dull moment on X.”
Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI but cut ties with the company in 2018 after he was unable to persuade its other leaders to put him in charge of a for-profit OpenAI entity or merge the company with Tesla.
Both Musk and Altman started OpenAI as a charity in 2015. When Musk left, Altman became the chief executive and the company established a for-profit subsidiary to raise money from investors and Microsoft. Now, Altman is looking to turn the subsidiary into a traditional company, the WSJ reported.
Last month, Trump announced a massive $500 billion infrastructure project called Stargate. Major names including Softbank, OpenAI and Oracle plan to join forces to build data centers in the U.S. for the further development of AI.
FOX Business’ Greg Wehner contributed to this report.
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