OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has dismissed a $97.4 billion takeover bid led by rival Elon Musk, but the unsolicited offer could complicate Altman’s push to transform the maker of ChatGPT into a for-profit company. “We are not for sale,” Altman said Tuesday at an artificial intelligence summit in Paris. Musk’s bid, announced Monday, is the latest in a bitter years-long battle with Altman over control of the AI startup they both helped found a decade ago as a nonprofit and is now a leading force in the global boom surrounding generative AI technology. “OpenAI has a mission,” Altman told France’s AI minister in an on-stage discussion Tuesday mobbed by tech industry workers and investors. “We are an unusual organization and we have this mission of making AGI benefit all humanity. And we are here to do that.” Its stated aim since its founding in 2015 is to safely build futuristic, better-than-human AI known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Musk, an early investor and board member, quit OpenAI in 2018 after an internal power struggle left Altman in charge. Their public feud has escalated over the past year as Musk sued OpenAI and is working to grow his own AI company called xAI, part of a business empire that includes Tesla, SpaceX and social media platform X. Musk also now holds power as a top adviser to President Donald Trump in reshaping the U.S. government, and has publicly questioned OpenAI’s Trump-backed private investment project for building AI data centers in the United States. What happens next? The offer complicates OpenAI’s plan to shift its structure away from its nonprofit roots to a company beholden to shareholders. OpenAI’s nonprofit board will need to consider Musk’s offer. It’s not Altman alone who can accept or reject it, though the chair of the board, Bret Taylor, echoed Altman’s approach and declared “OpenAI is not for sale” at a Wall Street Journal event Tuesday in Palo Alto, California. Taylor said Musk’s move was “largely a distraction” from the board’s fiduciary duty to its mission. As a nonprofit board, said Taylor, “our job is very simple, which is to basically evaluate every strategic decision of the organization through that one test, which is, ‘Does this actually further the mission of ensuring AGI benefits humanity?’ And I have a hard time seeing how this would.” The board will need to weigh not just the value of the company’s assets but also the value of controlling the company developing this technology. Musk’s offer also seems to set a floor for how much the nonprofit should be paid if it does relinquish control of its subsidiaries. Rose Chan Loui, executive director for the Lowell Milken Center on Philanthropy and Nonprofits at UCLA Law, said the board should consider the credibility of Musk’s offer, including if he and his investors will pay in cash. And they should consider whether a new board under the control of Musk and other investors would be independent and what guarantees they can give about protecting its public mission. Musk’s $44 billion Twitter takeover in 2022 also started with an unsolicited offer and a legal fight with Twitter’s board, which was also led by Taylor, a former Facebook and Salesforce executive. However, taking over OpenAI would be more complicated because of its charitable purpose. […]