At long last, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has taken the stand in the ongoing Musk v. Altman trial.
In several hours of questioning, the Big Tech chief shared details about the early days of Microsoft’s long-running partnership with OpenAI and the role he played during the shocking temporary ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in 2023.
But it was Nadella’s comments about OpenAI co-founder and xAI CEO Elon Musk, whose lawsuit accuses OpenAI of abandoning its charitable mission for profit generation, that stood out.
Musk never contacted Nadella with concerns that Microsoft’s OpenAI investments were in violation of any existing commitments, the Microsoft CEO
said, despite Musk’s later comments that Microsoft’s $10 billion investment was evidence of OpenAI violating its charitable mission.
“We have each other’s phone numbers,” Nadella testified.
Musk added Microsoft to the suit several months after suing OpenAI in 2024, alleging that the company helped OpenAI abandon its founding mission.
On Monday, Nadella rejected that claim. “It has always been my view that the nonprofit approved the creation of the for-profit so that they could pursue the mission,”
he said.
And what of Microsoft’s $13 billion of investments in OpenAI’s for-profit arm? Nadella described it as a “win-win” situation after Microsoft shouldered “all the risk” once Musk stopped funding OpenAI and left its board in 2018.
OpenAI had a “zero percent chance of success” after Musk’s departure, Musk
allegedly told co-founder Ilya Sutskever, because it didn’t have a “big enough computer” to pursue artificial general intelligence. So what’s wrong with Microsoft footing the bill?
—AN