Sam Altman-Elon Musk feud timeline: Musk reportedly bids $97.4 billion for Altman’s OpenAI

Timeline

• February 10, 2025
  Musk leads a $97.4 billion unsolicited bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit arm submitted to the entity Monday, a deal which if accepted could lead to Musk’s xAI merger with OpenAI if the bid is accepted, according to the Journal; Musk told the Journal he hopes “for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was.”
  
• Altman mocked the offer: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” he posted to Musk’s X social media site formerly known as Twitter, referring to the company’s diminished valuation from the $44 billion price tag Musk paid in 2022.
  
• January 24, 2025
  Musk reposts on X a summary of a Financial Times report on Stargate, the $500 billion tech initiative involving OpenAI that Musk’s ally President Donald Trump announced last month: The anonymously sourced Financial Times report said the project has yet to secure the required financing, including an unattributed quote that they “haven’t figured out the structure, they haven’t figured out the financing, they don’t have the money committed,” leading Musk to reply approvingly to a commenter who claimed Stargate “is already falling apart before it even starts.”
  
• January 23, 2025
  Trump brings the feud between Altman and his close ally Musk to a national stage, telling reporters “Elon doesn’t like one of those people” involved in Stargate, apparently referring to Altman, who wrote earlier Thursday on X, “just one more mean tweet and then maybe you’ll love yourself…,” making what seemed a pointed dig at Musk in response to his flurry of negative tweets about Stargate and Altman.
  
• January 22, 2025
  Musk questioned whether the “fake” Stargate had secured the announced funding and tore into Altman on X, referring to him as a “swindler” and a “liar,” also resharing Altman’s 2021 post celebrating Trump’s 2020 election loss–Altman fired back he doesn’t think Musk is a “nice person” and Musk’s criticism stems from his involvement with OpenAI rival, writing “what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies.”
  
• January 21, 2025
  Altman appeared alongside Trump announcing the $500 billion Stargate joint venture aimed at building out the physical data centers needed to power OpenAI’s artificial general intelligence ambitions, with Trump notably lauding Altman as “by far the leading expert” in generative AI, and Altman praising Trump, saying the project wouldn’t have been possible “without you.”
  
• March 1, 2024
  Musk initially sued OpenAI for allegedly becoming a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of its investor Microsoft, following up in November with a preliminary injunction to stop the “market-paralyzing gorgon” OpenAI from becoming a for-profit entity, while later calling Altman “someone who is not trustworthy” in an October interview with Tucker Carlson.
  
• July 12, 2023
  Musk announces his own generative AI startup, xAI, creating the generative AI chatbot Grok that he described as an anti “woke” response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT program, which was released to the public Nov. 30, 2022 to significant fanfare.
  
• 2018
  Musk leaves OpenAI’s board of directors in a decision the organization described at the time as the elimination of “a potential future conflict for Elon…as Tesla continues to become more focused on AI,” referring to the electric vehicle company’s push into autonomous driving, though OpenAI’s later recounting of the circumstances painted a more contentious picture, saying Musk left OpenAI after the company rebuked his attempts to have more than 50% equity and the chief executive role at a for-profit OpenAI, or to merge OpenAI into Tesla.
  
• 2015
  Altman and Musk are among 11 cofounders of OpenAI, serving as co-chairs of the non-profit research organization with the mission to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” according to its introductory blog post, which noted Altman, Musk, and billionaire venture capitalists Reid Hoffman (famously a Democratic megadonor) and Peter Thiel (famously a GOP megadonor) were among those who infused OpenAI with $1 billion at its founded.