— Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella made a huge bet on the world’s hottest AI company. After it nearly blew up on him, he now emerges with closer ties to its leader, Sam Altman.
Satya Nadella couldn’t help himself.
He couldn’t pay close attention to his native India playing Australia in the Cricket World Cup because he found himself in the middle of another game with more action and a whole lot more at stake. Still, in the midst of frantic negotiating and disaster planning, Nadella kept checking the score and reporting updates about his favorite sport to less fanatical colleagues. His team was in trouble, but there was still hope for his company.
The nuttiest weekend in his nearly 10 years on the job started last Friday, when Nadella learned just minutes before the rest of the world that OpenAI’s board had just ousted Sam Altman, its co-founder and CEO. The company behind ChatGPT had been seeking a valuation at $90 billion. Rarely has one board decision threatened to destroy so much value in so little time.
Despite the fact that Microsoft had paid billions for a 49% stake in OpenAI, using its technology to power a new generation of software that it promised could revolutionize work, the startup’s biggest investor didn’t have a board seat. Nadella found out at more or less the same time as everyone else that his investment—one that almost single-handedly catapulted Microsoft to the forefront of the artificial-intelligence revolution—had suddenly gone wrong.
But when the board turned on Altman, Altman immediately turned to Nadella. Hours after the boardroom coup last Friday, they were on the phone, discussing how to restore Altman to OpenAI—or join Microsoft. If Altman wasn’t hired back to his place atop OpenAI, the former CEO of the glitziest AI company would become an employee of Microsoft.
By the end of the frenetic weekend, Altman had agreed to start a new AI divisionat the tech giant, so he could keep working with Nadella and take advantage of Microsoft’s access to computing power. Soon it became clear that hundreds of researchers were ready to join Altman at a corporation as sexy as soup. Microsoft prepared to give those engineers everything they needed to continue their work: a floor in LinkedIn’s offices, plentiful cloud-computing resources, Apple laptops. The trillion-dollar company’s employees assured their potential colleagues that they wouldn’t even have to use Microsoft’s workplace-communications app Teams.
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— Techmeme, Wall Street Journal