A team of investors led by Elon Musk put in a bid to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion, a fraction of the company’s value. OpenAI founder Sam Altman merely responded, “No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

It’s difficult to see today’s semi-bombshell news in the New York Times that Elon Musk made a bid to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion as anything other than an extension of the ongoing billionaire pissing match between Musk and OpenAI founder Sam Altman. Musk was one of the original co-founders and investors in OpenAI, and tried to power-grab control of the whole thing in 2017, but left and sued OpenAI when he was denied this. OpenAI has gone on to produce the runaway hit AI product ChatGPT, while Musk’s competing product Grok is far less-used and less-effective. And really, OpenAI is now worth a valuation in the hundreds of billions, making Musk’s offer seem ludicrous.  

Altman’s whimsical response reflected this, as he tweeted, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

To which Musk fired back, “Swindler.”

To which some joker noted, “This is Kendrick vs Drake for nerds.”

It’s actually more complicated than that. OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit, but is reincorporating as a for-profit company. A massive recent round of funding that ended up totaling $40 billion left the company’s valuation at $300 billion. So yes, Elon’s offer would seem a laughably lowball bid.

But Musk is apparently not bidding on the whole OpenAI company, but rather, the assets belonging to the underlying nonprofit that founded the company. For OpenAI to convert to a for-profit company, someone (likely Altman) would need to buy those nonprofit assets. The nonprofit is only valued at $40 billion, so a “fair market value” sale price would be pushed much higher if this outlier offer bid were out there — even if it’s a non-serious troll bid, because Musk has the money to follow through.

It’s technically not just Musk’s bid. Other minority investors in the bid include Musk’s rival company Xai, a firm called Vy Capital, and Hollywood mega-agent Ari Emanuel (who was parenthetically the inspiration for Jeremy Piven’s character Ari Gold on the old HBO show Entourage).  

This whole thing is obviously all about a very personal beef between Musk and Altman. Musk may be engaged in a ploy to force Altman into bidding against himself, just by putting a higher price out there. And it’s surely going to complicate OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company in ways that no one can foresee yet. So Musk is likely playing chaos agent, and maybe he sees a chance he can derail OpenAI’s future, or he's just trolling, per usual.

Related: Elon Musk Fumes as $500 Billion AI Data Center Investment Comes From Sam Altman and Not Him [SFist]

Image: SAN FRANCISCO, CA - OCTOBER 06: (L-R) Tesla Motors CEO and Product Architect Elon Musk, Y Combinator President Sam Altman and The New York Times Financial Columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin speak onstage during "What Will They Think of Next? Talking About Innovation" at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 6, 2015 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Mike Windle/Getty Images for Vanity Fair)