Elon Musk just offered to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion
(www.theverge.com)
from some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to technology@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2025 21:31
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29313072
from some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to technology@lemmy.world on 10 Feb 2025 21:31
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29313072
It isn’t racist enough, so he has to take over and train it on nazi propaganda.
threaded - newest
As long as he pays for it, and not the US taxpayer....
How the fuck would we know? He has access to pretty much everything and has shown absolute contempt for the other branches that can stop him. He could drain social security, and no one would be the wiser till payments stopped.
When you government is made up of limp dick cucks... you don't know.
Welcome to 2025 America where nepo babies rule and men with any backbone get fired.
Interesting that he’s making this offer now, isn’t it. Almost like he’s recently got access to a large sum of money.
Nah, he’ll get foreign investors to help him and be further owned by foreign governments like he did for X.
I will be shocked if he uses his own money for this. He just got a ton of backdoors into the treasury department, remember? That was just last week.
Satya won’t be happy about that.
not even one-third of the valuation openai thinks they’re worth (up to 340b). and still below what investors thought in 2022 (157b). src
i think this is old spice admitting that xAI is total bullshit and he’s giving up on making his own.
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Yes, specially 600 billion of federal funding
I’d take $5M of government funding and make similar progress. Yo DOGE, call me.
I thought this was because he’s still pissy they cut him out, but I guess his reasons can be multifaceted
Maybe below what investors or OpenAI thinks, but I think I’d take it. Unless they’ve got more secrets up their sleeve I don’t seem them ever being worth that much.
Well, to be 100% fair, it’s all total bullshit.
I use a 16b reduction of deepseek-r1 on my pc at home and it’s definitely not total bullshit. It’s 10gb of local model that can solve mathematics and physics problems for you or program in python or bash. It doesn’t hallucinate (or I haven’t been able to elicit it), it’s aware of the extents of its knowledge. It works incredibly fast on an old ryzen 1600 with 6600xt. Having an open source reasoning AI that takes 10gb of SSD and about 13 gb of ram is so weird that the only thing weirder is seeing smart people dismiss it as bullshit out of hand.
It’s still an LLM right? I’m going to have to take issue with your use of the word ‘reasoning’ here
OK, it just spits predicted tokens, but in answer to what you asked and sensitive to the context you provided and its predictions are arranged such that when you decode them into language they present evidence or arguments used in thinking or argumentation. It also forms conclusions, inferences and produces results to problems, if you allow me to recycle from a dictionary definition of “reasoning”. It’s not perfect and obviously you can’t cram a huge amount into a 16b distillation and it certainly can get things wrong, but you have to squint to not see reasoning when you ask it to guesstimate something or solve a mathematical problem. It is an LLM but there’s reasoning coming out?
Yeah I see what you mean. There’s a decent argument to be made that something like reasoning appears as an emergent property in this kind of system, I’ll admit. Still, the fact that fundamentally the code works as a prediction engine rules out any sort of real cognition, even if it makes an impressive simulacrum. There’s just no ability to invent, no true novelty, which – to my mind at least – is the hallmark of actual reasoning.
Lol is that even a thing? xAI? I’ve never heard of it, and I self host AI’s, and explore them often.
It’s real. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)
How stupid is this conspiracy theory:
If it were a threat, like “this is what you’re gonna be worth if you don’t accept, anyway” depending on how power drunk he was feeling when hitting Tweet
Open-source just turned its value to dog shit, I’d say the offer is far above its value.
With how twitters value has gone since he bought it, I’d say he is pretty bad at this
But remember, all of his wealth is only potential, not realized! He ackshually can’t afford to make the world a better place!
I mean an island with no internet connection isn’t that expensive to him
The best and most affordable way for Elon Musk to “make the world a better place” would be to drop dead.
Hahah he really hates Altman’s guts. Good. Love to see those two expend their energy on each other rather than on fucking all of us.
Unfortunately they can multitask
You guys both posted it within a few seconds of each other judging by my app updating the time. Impressive.
Unfortunately, they can multitask
But only one has a comma.
Coma did you say?
Unfortunately, they can multitask
Musk isnt very good at that. He seems to Godzilla’s his way through one project at a time, while interns clean up behind him.
Still slows down some of their other goals. Attention and resources aren’t infinite. The more they wear themselves thin on things that don’t matter / have less bad outcomes, the better
Unfortunately he has a gaggle of hitler youth in tow doing his bidding for him
There is still a finite amount of time per day. Any amount of time spent on this is less they have available for everything else.
Couldn’t even pay for twitter himself, that broke ass
OpenAI’s Yahoo! moment. In a decade it’ll be worthless.
It already is. They’ll bleed users until they are irrelevant at this point.
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
That’s a really low offer; the company easily at the very least has three times that valuation.
What is this? An OpenAI for ants?
Would be funny to watch this go through and see how quickly he changes his mind on Open AI’s business model.
He’d be allowed to back out on this one unlike Twitter. He’d use his power with trump to prevent the SEC from forcing the sale to go through like the SEC did with Twitter.
I’m referring to his complaints about open ai moving towards a for profit business model. Musk wants to stop this.
I guess grok isn’t doing so well.
Probably just the same market manipulation he tried with Twitter and succeeded with Bitcoin.
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Unfortunately, looks like buying Twitter was a very effective choice if you take profit off the priority list
I mean, yeah. That was the entire point of him buying it: to control one of the biggest social media networks ever, and to use that to push and pull the public discourse however he wanted, in the interest of being a kingmaker. And it fucking worked.
and sadly, the amount of people who use chatgpt to try and get factual information, is quite high… which makes this even more terrifying. It’s about systematically gaining control of communication and information.
There’s tons of alternatives out there now that are as good or better.
If he gets it then clearly it will be the Confederate States ChatGPT.
Are they as popular, or the default use. How many “alternatives” are actually just piping through chatgpt.
Controlling information means getting control of the defaults, the ones people are used to using.
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I’ve had people on Reddit and Lemmy dispute my comments by citing ChatGPT… AI is a really innovative wrench that people are using as a hammer.
I also blame the AI companies for pushing that usage. It doesn’t matter how many tiny disclaimers Google and Microsoft add when they return AI answers to queries by default.
Even if you don’t take profit off the list, it could well be that he had more financial success in these other companies because he uses twitter as promotion and propaganda platform…
It’ll work this time. He just has to be even shittier about it. /s
Buy a company mostly with other people’s money (he paid ~15B of the 44B offer) lose a lot, 70% or more but use it to win an election and gain 200B in profit.
Musk is a salesman and he’s good at getting investors to get behind his crap. He’s never produced actual value but that doesn’t matter to stock values apparently.
Tesla investors are starting to care, it seems.
Ruin country USA so it is worth 80% less.
chump change fellas
Why not make it an even 100 billion is what I would ask if I were uninformed, which I am, so it’s what I’m asking.
Because if you believe it’s worth $97B you don’t offer to overpay by $3B…
I really hope he tanks Open AI.
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His net worth is NOT how much money he is net positive. All his net worth means, is he has hundreds of billions of assets, it says nothing for the debt load he is holding onto, nor how much of his assets are already leveraged. With how throughly he has obliterated xitters ad income when it was being sold because investors were unhappy with ad income already being too low, it looks like ol Elon might have found a sure fire way to turn a billion into a million, and somehow people keep loaning him money… Have they checked who else has their financial interests vested in assets he “owns” or when you have that much stuff do they just assume no one else is using it for collateral… Just be interesting if suddenly his entire fortune went up with a puff of smoke because the debt load was too high and one of his investments went further sour causing a cascade similar to a short squeeze, just encapsulated entirely on elon musk and his assets being liquidated…
At least part of the money he’s invested in things like Twitter etc he borrowed from other companies he owns that are overvalued (Tesla).
I thought he only barely pulled off the Twitter deal at $40B, now he’s going 2x+ that much?
Saudis were happy to bankroll it to kill the main organisation platform behind the Arab Spring uprisings
Gotta ride that debt wave - what else is there to do in life? ("Helping people" is somehow not an option, nor is simply leaving well enough alone, we apparently "need" to have his face and name and one arm raised in nearly every conversation taking place on planet earth)
“NaziAI” has a real ring to it.
Arnim Zola IRL
nAzI
NazAI
This guy understands graphic design
AI did nazi that coming.
Ah so he’s again going to pay twice the amount of what it’s worth to then run of off a cliff and make it worth 20% of it’s real value within a years time?
Seriously, why do people still believe anything this scammer says?
I mean, they believed everything Trump said because he was “a business man, not a politician” even though all he ever was was a failed business man. These people are functional at best - they ain’t bright.
OK, what’s the fediverse alternative for ChatGPT?
Running the models locally.
well…I guess I can use chatGPT to walk me through setting one up?! I can use a double 4090 RTX config instead of heating too. (these are really fucked up times)
Look here: ollama.com
You guys are awesome!
Download LM Studio.
SpeakIt. It’s like SheepIt but for powering language models.
Source: i made it up
anythingllm.com (run them locally)
How does it compare to ollama in your experience?
Easier to get up and running with it’s own interface (no need to run on localhost/with browser). Ollama is better if you want to tweak and customize.
openwebui.com
If only their slapfight meant something good for the world. At least, I don’t see everything collected in Musk’s hands.
Lmao “Twitter”
I’ll believe that when I see it.
lol. Wasn’t grok built specifically without safety in mind?
Musk: “Yeah safety as in: We must secure the safety of our people and a future for… “Real American” children.”
Elon’s $97.4B hostile takeover bid for OpenAI is less about “safety” and more about a billionaire’s corporate tantrum. The offer reeks of desperation—a laughable lowball for a company valued at $340B, dressed as altruism.
Altman’s clapback—“buy Twitter for $9.74B”—is the perfect middle finger to Musk’s flailing empire. Remember when X became a $44B dumpster fire? Now he wants to drag OpenAI into his orbit of mismanaged toys.
This feud isn’t about AI ethics—it’s two tech oligarchs weaponizing legal battles and PR stunts. Musk’s “open-source” crusade is safety theater while his own xAI hoards code. The only winner here? Lawyers billing hourly as the world burns.
To be clear (and as far as I understand), it’s not a hostile takeover bid because it cannot be: OpenAI is not a public company and thus doesn’t have a fiduciary duty to thousands to millions of shareholders but instead to a handful of big investors who can decide for themselves whether they want that Elon’s money or not. So this isn’t similar to what Twitter had been through but more like Elon teasing Altman I believe.
The distinction you’re making is valid but misses the forest for the trees. Whether OpenAI is public or not, Musk’s bid is a textbook power play, not a genuine offer. The lack of fiduciary duty doesn’t erase the intent—it amplifies it. This isn’t about shareholder obligations; it’s about Musk leveraging his wealth to reshape AI governance in his image.
Comparing this to Altman’s jab at Twitter isn’t apples-to-apples. Altman’s point was rhetorical, highlighting Musk’s track record of overpromising and underdelivering. The “open-source” crusade Musk touts is hollow when xAI remains proprietary.
This isn’t about legality or structure—it’s about influence and control. Dressing it up as altruism insults anyone paying attention.
I read this on Hacker News, which I found particularly interesting:
The Hacker News post you referenced aligns with the broader narrative: Musk’s bid isn’t about acquiring OpenAI but about obstructing its for-profit transition. By setting a high valuation benchmark, he’s complicating regulatory approval and forcing a reassessment of the nonprofit’s stake. This isn’t altruism; it’s a calculated disruption aimed at frustrating Altman and OpenAI’s leadership.
The bid also underscores Musk’s ongoing feud with Altman, weaponizing financial maneuvers to challenge OpenAI’s trajectory. It’s less about AI ethics or governance and more about power plays and ego clashes.
While the restructuring may benefit the nonprofit financially in theory, Musk’s interference highlights how these transitions often prioritize control over mission. Dressing this up as concern for AI governance is disingenuous—it’s a chess match between tech oligarchs, with humanity as the board.
Public companies only have fiduciary duty to their sharehoders to the extent that their corporate charters say that they do. It’s entirely possible to launch a corporation that promises nothing to its shareholders, though it might be difficult to find investors.
B Type corps have a fair number of investors, looking to invest. A lot of investors look for socially conscious investments.
I found 100 000 dollars
Cage fight is no option anymore? 😎
Well, maybe it is better this way. Let them ruin each other, and their companies. The world will be a better place then.
Where is the “hide Musk/DOGE/Trump related posts” button ?
EDIT : Found it ! (Damn, Lemmy is awesome 😊)
<img alt="" src="https://jlai.lu/pictrs/image/f0545cd3-42d4-4f37-9308-793c7635ade4.png">
Bro, I think you just wiped out your entire front page.
They’re also hiding their head in the sand, which might be a bigger issue.
I’m still reading the old school press and listening to the radio. I’m just not on lemmy to read about it AGAIN… On top of that, it’s mostly absurd and inaplicable announcements. They crave attention so much, it’s painful to listen. Look at Musk’s video gaming scheme. Just pathetic…
Ok, that’s fair. It is very hard to tell these days who is paying attention but overwhelmed and who is saying “this is all bad news, so I’m going to ignore it because I don’t like hearing about bad things.” The latter is the dangerous attitude. I’m glad it isn’t yours, but unfortunately Lemmy is not free of it.
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Not sure FlyingSquid is aware of life outside Lemmy. They’re addicted to the lotus flowers here.
There are two sides to this. There’s yours, and then there is self-care and self-protection. Being constantly bombarded with this shit, these issues, problems and the world going down hill while you as an individual can’t even begin to influence or have any kind of impact on them can and will wreck your mental health.
In the end it needs balance. Don’t stick your head in the sand, but also don’t drown in the never ending despair that is the flood of bad news in modern media.
When it’s actual news, I’ll hear about it regardless.
I’m not going to perseverate over every headline, I have a life to live. The media is actively trying to piss us off, they’ll skew and distort and all but fabricate to keep us angry and engaged.
I’m not doing it. I can’t recall a single time in my life that keeping up to date up to the hour has actually improved anything for me. Sitting around just knowing stuff is happening isn’t going to change my life for the better.
I live in a safe republican state and a leans Republican district. I could send a letter to my senator, call my representative, spend hours of my time just worried about something, and still, they’ll vote how the party wants them to. Being informed and doing the things I’m supposed to do won’t change anything.
But being good to your neighbors and doing direct action like volunteering will make a huge difference, and you don’t need the news for that!
Yeah, I’m pretty much done with Lemmy right now. It’s just getting way too much. The sky is falling every five minutes.
I don’t see this option sadly, only block instance/community/user. Would love to block Trump/Musks fucking faces from my life.
It depends on which app you’re using. Mine is the Android version of Voyager 😉
This kind of thing is why it’s short-sighted even for the other tech guys to cozy up to Trump. There’s no room for anyone other than Musk and he is just going to use his leverage with Trump to screw over the other billionaires as well.
Anyone cozying up to Trump is announcing they have skeletons in their closet and he has the dirt.
YES!
Finally a way to destroy the AI hype.
Maybe the man is good for something besides wasting oxygen after all.
Lol does he even have the money/stocks/bank friends to buy at that price?
Destroy it?
Like he destroyed Twitter by turning it into his personal propaganda outlet, maybe.
It sounds to me like he’s just positioning himself to control an AI tech provider who will conveniently be contracted to replace all the government positions he is trying to eliminate.
even if openai are assholes, chatgpt is still useful for things as long as you dont put too much trust in it. If that fucker buys it they will turn it into racist shitspewing garbage. Without it, regular people will have no decent or easy way to utilize ai and this new tech will benefit only the rich who will use it to oppress us even worse.
Stinky isnt an idiot, i wish he was. Anything he buys he can and will use to cause harm to us. So this would be bad for us all.
Deepseek took the training of foundation models from a billionaire’s game to a millionaire’s game. If Elon wants an AI monopoly, it’ll have to be done through litigation. Which, ya know, they’re also trying.
Regular users can use Gemini, Deepseek, Meta AI, and there will probably be many more services in the future.
deepseek has censorship which makes it unreliable. But hopefully someone will fix that since its opensource. So at least there is that. google is garbage in comparison to chatgpt and i havent tried anything meta has produced since i dont want to have anything to do with that filth, so i dont know anything about that one. So maybe there is some hope in long term, if things dont get worse elsewhere.
Oh, I forgot about Claude. Last time I tried it, it seemed on par or even better that ChatGPT-4o (but was missing features like browsing).
Deepseek only has censorship on their hosted site… if you run the open source model on your own hardware it doesn’t seem to censor
I asked the locally-hosted version about Tienanmen Square and it gave an accurate description, but the wording was a bit sympathetic to the CCP. It was like “according to some people, this is what happened, but the government contests this.”
Honestly that’s probably just the data it’s been trained on, rather than explicit instructions to censor the incident.
Makes sense that a Chinese AI would be trained on more Chinese sources than a western AI.
Chatgpt is also censored.
Yep, its very useful for generating buzzword salad, so I use it for cover letters for job postings.
Pretty much what I use my locally hosted LLM for. Might not be as good as ChatGPT but I don’t really care.
How to become a millionaire: Start with 97.4 Billion.
In order to ruin it like Twitter?
Is he going to buy a “founder” clause in the contract?
Well this time he actually is one of the founders. He invested 45 million to launch OpenAI and he was co-chair with Altman
forbes.com/…/elon-musk-and-peter-thiel-launch-ope…
He can afford to pay twice the price of Twitter because he’s using government money. Remember he barely swung the 44 billion for Twitter. Now he’s buying something for more than double that? After putting code into the Treasury department computers to hide transactions?
Lmao.
Yep, seems legit, eh? 🤣
Pretty sure he’s now functionally the worlds richest man (including oligarchs with a lot of hidden wealth) what with his newly aquired un-supervised access to 6 trillion in US government funds.
He bought Twitter for 44 billion… and the US presidency for 290 million.
That is the single most dystopian shit I have ever heard. The idea that people and countries are so dirt cheap and companies are orders of magnitude more valuable is a thing that should damn their souls to hell.
You how bad this is affecting me? I’ve been an atheist and anti-death penality most of my life… Musk has for the past while made me think that the death penalty needs to be applied to people like him (and Israeli war criminals) and not to common crooks and common murderers. He is even making me want a hell to exist so people like him can burn in it.
So, about a dollar per American.
Everyone should’ve chipped in with a dollar and you’d have your own country! /s
But that’s socialism.
I wonder if that’d work. Do a crowdfunding for certain legislation, and pay it out to whoever votes for it (with a bonus for whoever first proposes the legislation). Dystopian as fuck, but perhaps worth an experiment.
Less. Our population is something like 330m now I think.
That’s on par with the fundraising goal for my kid’s elementary school. About a dollar per person in the district.
Totally different situation though, since these suckers at the school are going to spend it on a bunch of kids who haven’t even labored in the mines for it.
Exactly same situation here. Every day I’m wanting to strangle him and all the other nazis and nazi enablers working in this government. An eternity of suffering would be the only way to approach the suffering of thousands of people through their entire lives that he and all these monsters are causing, not just to those living right now but who knows how generations following
Exactly. It is like Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. It enshrined segregation as legal and was never over turned. It wouldn’t be until 60+ years before segregation is overturned. That is literally a lifetime. And we all know that it was never really overturned, so it’s effects are still shown.
Segregation was also expanded in the following decades that robbed black people of opportunities to grow generational wealth, in the wake of the decision and other racist events.
Why buy it now and not earlier?
He offered to buy it with someone else’s money and take the credit
I’ve never understood how you can take out a loan to buy a company, turn around and place all that debt on the company you just bought, and have no personal ramifications when the company goes belly up because the debt load is too high.
This is corporate trolling. Open AI is trying to go public soon, and Elon did this to fuck with that.
Massive oversimplification but basically: In the United States, you are required to take the best offer when selling a company, unless you can argue in court that you had reasons not to sell to whomever placed the highest bid. Because of this offer, as open AI attempts to go public, they will have to either to be close to Elon’s bid, forced to sell to him, go to court and fight him ther, or be forced to remain private.
Lmao, musk is on record as making absurd offers and then trying everything he can to back out of them. I’m not sure why he offered this himself instead of getting a consortium of investors together to do so on his behalf without any involvement from him.
Isn’t this what he did with Twitter and the courts forced him to honor the offer?
But they aren’t required to sell though.
Yes, they could remain private but they are attempting to go public. This action is a legal speedbump that they must now work really hard to maneuver around.
I feel like “look at twitter” is probably enough of a defence to decline president musk.
It would probably need to be wordier for court proceedings.
I wonder why his offer wasn’t 69.420 billion?
nono