The tech mogul is unlikely to win. But his goal may be more about making life difficult for the A.I. start-up and its leader, Sam Altman.
By Andrew Ross Sorkin, Ravi Mattu, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch, Edmund Lee and Kevin Roose, NY Times
We have spent much of the past 24 hours on the telephone trying to get to the bottom of Elon Musk’s hostile bid for Sam Altman’s OpenAI. It was a development in their corporate battle (or soap opera) that few could have seen coming. Altman, who is in Paris at an A.I. summit, hadn’t even seen the offer before rejecting it out of hand.
But what does it mean to make a hostile bid for a nonprofit? How do board members actually balance any fiduciary duties they owe to investors in a for-profit subsidiary versus their institution’s mission? The man in the middle of all of these questions is Bret Taylor, the board’s chair. Taylor has more experience dealing with a hostile bid by Musk than most: he was the chair of Twitter’s board when Musk bought it. We break it all down below.
