In what is becoming an increasingly tiresome and petty personal spat between a pair of tech billionaires, the Wall Street Journal reports Monday that a consortium backed by xAI CEO Elon Musk has made an unsolicited, $97.4 billion bid for control over rival OpenAI. This offer comes mere months after Musk sued the company over its plan to transition to a for-profit business structure.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” the WSJ cited Musk as saying in a statement provided by his lawyer, Marc Toberoff, to the OpenAI board. “We will make sure that happens.”
The WSJ reports that the bid is being backed by xAI, which would likely merge with OpenAI, should the deal eventually go through. The board has not made any decisions about the offer as of yet, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly rejected Musk’s overtures, offering to instead purchase Twitter (now, officially, X “The Everything App”) for the same amount.
no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 10, 2025
Musk and Altman have been at this for years now. The two co-founded OpenAI in 2015, though Musk resigned from his position as co-chair of the company’s board in 2018 after his demands for “majority equity, absolute control, and to be CEO,” were rejected. He went on to found xAI in 2023 — purveyors of the Grok chatbot — and has since committed to relentlessly harassing OpenAI, and Sam Altman in particular.
In March 2023, half a year before founding xAI, Musk cosigned an open letter calling for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” It is surely only a coincidence that xAI itself publicly launched almost exactly six months after that letter was published.
In November of that year, shortly after Altman had been (temporarily) rousted from his leadership position at OpenAI, Musk shared an unsigned and anonymous letter that he “received” that accused Altman of numerous unethical dealings as CEO. The source of those accusations were eventually tracked to unverified posts made to Board.com, an anonymous message board site.
Musk has sued OpenAI multiple times in 2024 alone. In March, he sued the company along with Altman and the company’s President, Greg Brockman, over allegations that they had violated the company’s founding contract in their pursuit of commercial interests at the expense of the public good, though he subsequently withdrew the suit the day before a judge was scheduled to hand down their ruling on whether it could proceed or would be dismissed.
He revived that lawsuit in August with the same claims as before. “Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon — and in just eight years,” the complaint reads. “After Musk lent his name to the venture, invested significant time, tens of millions of dollars in seed capital and recruited top AI scientists for OpenAI Inc, Musk and the non-profit’s namesake objective were betrayed by Altman and his accomplices.”
In November, Musk abruptly amended the suit, expanding it to target OpenAI-backer, Microsoft, while naming Shivon Zilis, mother of three of Musk’s children, as a plaintiff. OpenAI responded in December with a blog post titled, “Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit,” detailing Musk’s initial support for the for-profit transition and provided email records to back up those assertions. The courts have not yet ruled on the ongoing lawsuit, but given that the running feud between the two men now stretches more than six years, there’s little hope that this latest salvo will be the last of their fight.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.