NASTY BUSINESS

Elon Musk Just Lost One of His Biggest Records to His Most Hated Rival

Sam Altman has been Musk’s nemesis since they fell out over the direction of OpenAI.

Sam Altman’s OpenAI has surpassed Elon Musk’s SpaceX to become the most valuable private company in the world, Bloomberg reports. The rivals were co-founders of the artificial intelligence company in 2015 but had a bitter falling out over its direction. Now Altman is offering current and former employees the opportunity to sell their shares to investors. The move has led the company’s valuation soar to $500 billion, $100 billion more than SpaceX, according to Bloomberg. That puts OpenAI’s valuation leaps and bounds above last year, when it was priced at $300 billion during a funding round. The employees are understood to have flipped $6.6 billion in shares to a host of investors. Citing a source familiar with the deal, Bloomberg reports buyers included “Thrive Capital, SoftBank Group Corp., Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX and T. Rowe Price.” Musk left the OpenAI board in 2018, and a multibillion-dollar investment from Microsoft followed the year after. Since then, Altman has driven toward turning OpenAI into what Bloomberg describes as “a traditional for-profit company.” Friend-turned-nemesis Musk has since sued the company, even offering to buy it.