Tweet Elon Musk is making a surprise bid for OpenAI's nonprofit arm after suing the company in 2024. Photos: Shutterstock Elon Musk and a group of investors have offered around $155 billion ($US97.4 billion) to buy the nonprofit arm of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which Musk sued earlier this year to prevent it from becoming a for-profit entity. Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff told The Wall Street Journal the unsolicited offer was submitted to OpenAI’s board of directors on Monday. The move escalates Musk’s push against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s plans to transition the firm to a for-profit company, after its innovations helped spur a generative artificial intelligence boom in recent years. Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI as a charity in 2015, but Musk left the company in 2019 and founded competing AI startup xAI in 2023. The billionaire, who owns social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, sued OpenAI in March 2024, alleging it had abandoned its original mission in “pursuit of profit”. “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided to US media. “We will make sure that happens.” Musk’s bid is reportedly backed by his company xAI and several venture capital firms. Altman says ‘no thank you’ Soon after news of Musk’s bid for OpenAI became public on Tuesday, Altman took to X. “No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” he quipped, moving Musk's decimal point to the left to suggest X had lost value, and referring to the platform by its old name. In his own X post less than an hour later, Musk called Altman “Scam Altman”. no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want