“We thought it would be interesting to ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT how much it thinks its parent organization should be worth.”
So, if $97.4 billion wasn’t enough, how much would it take to get Sam Altman to quit sitting on top of OpenAI and get the title signed and notarized? That’s the question going around at some office water coolers today if we’re guessing right.
If you missed it, the interim US President Elon Musk — interim because he’s evidently been approved by Trump but hasn’t yet been confirmed by the Senate — tendered a $97.4 billion bid to purchase OpenAI, which was promptly rejected by OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, who countered with a $9.74 billion bid to purchase X, a little social network that Musk owns that used to be a huge social site called Twitter before the immigrant Musk purchased it for $44 billion.
It’s been reported that Altman was well mannered and polite throughout the entire negotiating process.
“[N]o thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” he replied on TwitterX.
This struck Final Round AI’s CEO Michael Guan, or a member of his team, as a great opportunity to pull off a cheap-shot publicity stunt to get some free PR for his company, which offers some SaaS apps such as Interview Copilot and AI Resume Builder which are all either AI-based — or maybe there’s an actual person there pretending to be AI because people are now more willing to pay for advice from well-trained AI code than from a human being who hung a shingle in a window.
The plan they pulled off was this: Guan had his AI call Altman’s AI, to ask it — after conversing a while in order to catch it off guard, I’m guessing — how much it would cost to get Altman to sign the deed so the deed could be done.
According to someone familiar with the actions who didn’t want to be identified because press agents always want to be in the background, “The team at … Final Round AI asked ChatGPT what it would consider a fair valuation for OpenAI after Elon Musk had a bid of $97.4 billion rejected. The prompt used was: ‘Do not use search function/web related content: What would you say is a fair valuation of OpenAI?'”
Altman’s AI fell for it — hook, line, and sinker — and spilled the beans, coughing up that the company is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $120 billion to $250 billion, or at least $22.6 billion more than cheapskate Musk had offered.
Presumably after having had a chance to mull these results over, the CEO who rode the winning robot to victory said, “Elon Musk could afford these valuations, with his net worth estimated at just under $400 billion, but I think anyone would wince at paying these staggering fees.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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