Billionaire and White House advisor Elon Musk is leading a gigantic $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reports. Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, delivered the unsolicited offer to the ChatGPT maker’s board of directors today, signaling a dramatic escalation in his years-long beef with the company he co-founded alongside CEO Sam Altman in 2015. Musk rage quit the AI company after growing frustrated with its direction in 2019. “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by Toberoff, as quoted by the WSJ. “We will make sure that happens.” The timing of the bid is especially interesting, as Altman revealed that he regrets leading OpenAI’s transition ditch its open source roots in a Reddit AMA late last month. “I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy,” he wrote. Musk has repeatedly lashed out at Altman, going as far as to sue OpenAI last year for having been “transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft,” citing the latter’s major investment in the AI company. There’s a bit of a double standard there, it’s worth pointing out; Musk has raised billions of dollars for his own AI company, xAI, which is for-profit. Meanwhile, OpenAI has defended itself against Musk’s lawsuit, even demonstrating that Musk had once supported turning…Elon Musk Makes Huge Bid to Seize Control of OpenAI