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A group of investors led by Elon Musk has given OpenAI an unsolicited offer of $97.4 billion to buy the non-profit part of OpenAI. An attorney for the group submitted the bid to OpenAI Monday, the Wall Street Journal reports. Per the Journal, the other investors in the group include Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and 8VC, a venture firm led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Ari Emanuel, CEO of sports and entertainment company Endeavor, is also backing the offer through his investment fund. OpenAI uses a hybrid business structure that consists of a nonprofit parent entity (OpenAI, Inc.) and a for-profit subsidiary (OpenAI LP, referred to as a capped-profit company). In part because of the extraordinary high costs of inventing and training AI models, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 that has let it raise billions from Microsoft and others. Altman is now in the process of turning the subsidiary into a traditional company and spinning out the nonprofit. The non-profit would, however, own equity in the new for-profit. (Neither OpenAI nor Musk didnt immediately responded to Fast Companys requests for comment.) The situation may seem familiar to OpenAI board member Bret Taylor, who was chairman of Twitters board of directors when Musk bid for, then bought, the company in October 2022. Taylor left Twitter soon after, along with most of the board. The unsolicited bid ratchets up Musks ongoing battle with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. Musk, who cofounded OpenAI with Altman and others in 2015 (and now leads the Department of Government Efficiency), has already filed two lawsuits against OpenAI complaining that the company has deviated from its original nonprofit mission and is now prioritizing profit over public benefit. In the second lawsuit, filed in November 2024, OpenAIs backer Microsoft was named as a defendant. Musk and the other investors could conceivably end up owning a large share of the for-profit AI. Musks AI company, xAI, has said that its building large language models that are less constrained by political correctness and more focused on objective truth. OpenAI, meanwhile, has been focused on developing frontier models that achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI systems that can do most economically valuable tasks better than humans. OpenAIs for-profit arm is growing quickly. Altman is currently in discussions with the Japanese investment bank, SoftBank Group, which may invest up to $40 billion in the AI company, upping its value to about $300 billion.
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E-Commerce
Officials and federal officers turned away scores of U.S. Agency for International staffers who showed up for work Monday at its Washington headquarters, after a court temporarily blocked a Trump administration order that would have pulled all but a fraction of workers off the job worldwide. A front desk officer told a steady stream of agency staffers dressed in business clothes or USAID sweatshirts or T-shirts that he had a list of no more than 10 names of people allowed to enter the building. Tarps hung over USAID’s interior signs. A man who earlier identified himself as a USAID official took a harsher tone, telling staffers just go” and “why are you here? USAID staff were also denied entry to their offices to retrieve belongings and were told by officials that the agency’s lease had now been turned over to the General Services Administration, which manages federal government buildings. Neither the White House, State Department, USAID nor GSA immediately responded to requests for comment. The move marks the latest step in what has been the fast-paced dismantling of the six-decade-old U.S. aid and development agency and its programs worldwide three weeks ago. Even as President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who runs a cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, have taken aim at other government agencies, USAID has been hit hardest so far. The president signed an executive order freezing foreign assistance so the administration could review spending that it says is wasteful or not aligned with Trump’s agenda. That has forced U.S.-funded aid and development programs worldwide to shut down and lay off staff even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio had sought to mitigate the damage by issuing a waiver to exempt emergency food aid and life-saving programs. Despite the waiver, neither funding nor staffing has resumed to get even the most essential programs rolling again, USAID officials and aid groups say. The Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the largest humanitarian groups, called the U.S. cutoff the most devastating in its 79-year history and said Monday that it will have to suspend programs serving hundreds of thousands of people in 20 countries. The impact of this will be felt severely by the most vulnerable, from deeply neglected Burkina Faso, where we are the only organization supplying clean water to the 300,000 trapped in the blockaded city of Djibo, to war-torn Sudan, where we support nearly 500 bakeries in Darfur providing daily subsidized bread to hundreds of thousands of hunger-stricken people, the group said in a statement. In an interview aired Sunday with Fox News host Bret Baier ahead of the Super Bowl, Trump suggested that he might allow a handful of aid and development programs to resume under Rubios oversight. Let him take care of the few good ones, Trump said. Aid organizations say the damage that has been done to programs would make it impossible to restart many operations without additional substantial investment. A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked a Trump administration order that would have put thousands of USAID staffers on administrative leave that same day and given those abroad 30 days to get back to the United States at government expense. The temporary restraining order came in a lawsuit by two groups representing federal workers, and another hearing is scheduled for Wednesday. While the judge ordered the administration to restore agency email access for staffers, the order said nothing about reopening USAID headquarters. Some staffers and contractors reported having their agency email restored by Monday, while others said they did not. Some staffers told The Associated Press that they came to the USAID offices because they were confused by conflicting agency emails and notices over the weekend about whether they should go in. Others expected they would be turned away but went anyway. A USAID email sent Sunday night, saying it was From the office of the administrator, told employees that what it called the former USAID headquarters and other USAID offices in the Washington area were closed until further notice. It told workers to telework unless they are instructed otherwise. Department of Homeland Security officers and civilians also blocked USAID staffers and Democratic lawmakers from entering the headquarters last week. Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
U.S. President Donald Trump said Palestinians would not have the right of return to the Gaza Strip under his proposal to redevelop the enclave, according to excerpts from a Fox News interview. In a transcript released on Monday, Trump added that he thought he could make a deal with Jordan and Egypt to take the displaced Palestinians, saying the U.S. gives the two countries “billions and billions of dollars a year.” Asked if Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza, Trump told Fox: “No, they wouldn’t because they’re going to have much better housing,” according an excerpt Fox News broadcast on Monday. “I’m talking about building a permanent place for them,” he said, adding it would take years for Gaza to be habitable again. In a shock announcement last week, Trump proposed resettling Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians. His remarks to Fox were the first time he said they would have no right of return. Residents of Gaza have broadly rejected any suggestion of moving from the strip, as has the Palestinian Authority and the militant group Hamas that administers Gaza. Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said Trump’s statement that Palestinians would not be able to return to Gaza was “irresponsible.” “We affirm that such plans are capable of igniting the region,” he told Reuters on Monday. When Trump introduced his proposals last week, including one for the U.S. to take over Gaza, he drew rebukes from allies throughout the world. Palestinians and regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia rejected the proposal outright. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who met Trump last week, praised the proposal to resettle Palestinians. He said: “They can leave, they can then come back, they can relocate and come back. But you have to rebuild Gaza.” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will depart later this week for his first visit to the Middle East in the job, said Palestinians would have to “live somewhere else in the interim” while strip was rebuilt. Rubio met Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty in Washington on Monday for talks on regional stability, Egypt’s foreign ministry said on X, as Cairo fears Palestinians could be forced across Egypt’s border with Gaza. In portions of the interview broadcast on Sunday, Trump reiterated his plan to buy and own Gaza. In the latest excerpt released on Monday, Trump said between two and six communities could be built for the Palestinians “a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is.” “I would own this. Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land. No big money spent,” he told Fox. Susan Heavey, Simon Lewis, and Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Reuters
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E-Commerce
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