Musk Tried to Get Zuckerberg on Board to Buy OpenAI, Says Startup

Elon Musk wanted Mark Zuckerberg to join him in his bid to buy OpenAI, the startup said.

In a court filing on Thursday, OpenAI said that Musk and his AI startup xAI spoke to Meta’s CEO about “potential financing arrangements or investments” in OpenAI. Neither Zuckerberg nor Meta signed Musk’s letter of intent, the filing said.

In February, Musk’s lawyer confirmed that a team of Musk-led investors submitted a $97.6 billion bid to purchase the ChatGPT maker. OpenAI ultimately denied Musk’s proposal.

xAI and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Meta declined to comment.

Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman founded the AI startup with several others in 2015. Musk left the company’s board in 2018, citing conflicts over the company’s direction as it moved to a for-profit structure and explored a partnership with Microsoft.

Musk went on to launch rival xAI. He sued OpenAI twice for breaching its founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good and has asked courts to block restructuring attempts. Musk called the OpenAI chief “Scam Altman” in February.

Last week, the two billionaires traded accusations on X after Musk threatened to sue Apple over what he claims is preferential treatment for ChatGPT in the App Store rankings.

In the past year, Meta, too, has doubled down on efforts to improve its own large language model and chatbot, which competes with ChatGPT. Over the summer, Meta launched an all-out talent war, offering researchers from frontier labs such as OpenAI up to $100 million pay packages to join its superintelligence division. Recent big-name hires include former GitHub chief Nat Friedman, Scale AI’s former CEO Alexandr Wang, and former OpenAI researchers Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren.

In the filing, OpenAI asked the judge to order Meta to turn over documentation related to any communication the social media company had with Musk or xAI.