OpenAi’s board of directors formally rejected an offer from an investor group led by Elon Musk to buy the non -profit organization that controls the artificial intelligence company for $ 97.4 billion.
“OpenAi is not on sale, and the council unanimously rejected Mr. Musk’s latest attempt to destabilize his competition,” said Bret Taylor, president of OpenAi, in a statement on Friday on behalf of the board.
Musk, who co -founded OpenAi a decade before launching a rival AI startup, recruited a group of rich allies for an unquired money offer to buy non -profit organization’s assets. Other supporters of the proposal included Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital, 8VC of Joe Lonsdale and Ari Emanuel, through his investment fund. Musk said he hoped to return to OpenAi the status of “strength of good, focused on security and open source that has gone.”
Marc Toberoff, a lawyer who represents Musk and the investors, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The offer was quickly rejected earlier this week by OpenAi CEO Sam Altman, who called her a competitor’s tactic to “slow us down” and emphasized that the company “is not for sale.” Andrew Nussbaum, an OpenAi council lawyer, also said in a statement that OpenAi was not seeking to sell and stressed that the “only fiduciary duty” of directors is to fulfill the company’s mission to build more powerful hypothetical AI systems, called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which benefit humanity. “Respectfully,” he said, “it is not up to a competitor to decide what is the best interest of OpenAi’s mission.”
Musk repeatedly tried to deflect OpenAi’s plans to restructure itself as a more conventional profit company. The billionaire filed two actions against OpenAi for allegedly dodging its founding principles and asked a court to block the restructuring efforts of the ChatgPT creator. A judge recently said that he was reluctant to issue such an order immediately in a case that puts “billionaires against billionaires.”
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In a judicial document after the supply of Musk, OpenAi argued that its proposal to buy the company Mina its own allegation at the center of its lawsuit – that its assets cannot be “transferred” to “private gain”. Musk lawyers said in a subsequent legal discovery that MUSK would withdraw its offer if OpenAi agreed to interrupt its conversion to a company for profit.
“Any potential reorganization of OpenAI will strengthen our non-profit organization and its mission to ensure that AGI benefits all humanity,” Taylor said in Friday’s statement.
Regardless of the result, musk supply is expected to complicate the company’s restructuring process at a time when OpenAi is in negotiations with Softbank Group Corp. To raise a new round of mass financing, with such a high review as $ 300 billion.
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Currently, OpenAi has a profitable subsidiary that is governed by the non -profit organization and its council. As part of the planned corporate change, the company is expected to pay fair amount by the assets of the non-profit organization. Previously, OpenAi said it would compensate for the non -profit organization in the form of actions.
Legal experts have stated that regulators will be aware of the participation that the non -profit organization will receive. With the offer of $ 97.4 billion, Musk may have raised the minimum value that OpenAi needs to allocate.
“Openai’s advice is in a perfectly solid position to say no to Musk’s offer,” said Robert Bartlett, professor at Stanford Law School and co-director of Rock Center for Corporate Governance, prior to Bloomberg News. “But that does not mean that they can ignore branches of what offering means to appreciate OpenAi’s assets.”
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If OpenAi attributes a higher value to its non -profit organization, this may dilute the shareholding of current OpenAi’s current and future investors.
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