LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Why Did Elon Musk Just Offer to Buy Control of OpenAI for $100 Billion?” by garrison


Listen Later

This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to build Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work.

Wow. The Wall Street Journal just reported that, "a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI."

Technically, they can't actually do that, so I'm going to assume that Musk is trying to buy all of the nonprofit's assets, which include governing control over OpenAI's for-profit, as well as all the profits above the company's profit caps.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman already tweeted, "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want." (Musk, for his part [...]

---

Outline:

(02:42) The control premium

(04:17) Conversion significance

(05:43) Musks suit

(09:24) The stakes

---

First published:

February 11th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdb76S4viiTHfFr2u/why-did-elon-musk-just-offer-to-buy-control-of-openai-for

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

LessWrong (30+ Karma)By LessWrong


More shows like LessWrong (30+ Karma)

View all
Making Sense with Sam Harris by Sam Harris

Making Sense with Sam Harris

26,329 Listeners

Conversations with Tyler by Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Conversations with Tyler

2,442 Listeners

The Peter Attia Drive by Peter Attia, MD

The Peter Attia Drive

9,152 Listeners

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas by Sean Carroll | Wondery

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

4,152 Listeners

ManifoldOne by Steve Hsu

ManifoldOne

92 Listeners

Your Undivided Attention by The Center for Humane Technology, Tristan Harris, Daniel Barcay and Aza Raskin

Your Undivided Attention

1,598 Listeners

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg by All-In Podcast, LLC

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

9,901 Listeners

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

90 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

505 Listeners

Hard Fork by The New York Times

Hard Fork

5,472 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

16,038 Listeners

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis by PHD Ventures

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

539 Listeners

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups by Conviction

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

133 Listeners

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast by swyx + Alessio

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

95 Listeners

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley by BG2Pod

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley

515 Listeners