He says he provides suggestions a lot. And they’re just suggestions, including in the case of OpenAI. While Microsoft put forward 14 names, none of those names were added to the new OpenAI board except Sue Desmond-Hellman. CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who was added later.
He’s explaining that firing a CEO is “a fairly big things” and when he didn’t get any details on why Altman was fired, he felt that OpenAI’s board was “sort of amateur city as far as I was concerned.”
We also discover that Nadella has no idea if Altman and Musk talked about Musk’s mean Microsoft/OpenAI tweets. As a side note, we are referring exclusively to “Twitter” and “tweets” even for posts after the X rebrand.
I recognize Musk has identified this as the spot where he was convinced he’d been swindled. But the main thing I’m hearing here is that OpenAI was unstable. I don’t know what the correct way to respond to that kind of chaos is, especially if you have a partnership with the company that appears to be rapidly imploding. Trying to suggest that Nadella’s attempts to stabilize the company and preserve his investment was somehow improper seems weird? This is a genuinely odd situation, not necessarily one you run into in business school. (Well, until then anyway.)
“Pretty definitive statement as to why they fired him, right?” Well, Mr. Molo, no. I remember a great deal of speculation about what this meant; for instance, if Altman had gotten up to something criminal. One of those moments where I wonder what the jury is thinking, since I doubt they recall any of this.
Nadella is cooler than everyone else on cross, but he’s still getting worked up. Molo just got told by the judge that his question was argumentative. Molo is yelling about how the risk MSFT took on OpenAI was “prudent.” Nadella notes it’s still a risk. “At the time the was a risk it could to to zero,” Nadella says. “It was a calculated risk.” Molo, of course, is focused on projected return, of $92+ billion.
Molo is asking about this line Nadella wrote in a 2022 email, and it’s very funny. Nadella has explained a couple times that to him it’s about IP rights. “The context for me was making sure that Microsoft was benefitting from the IP rights that we had because that’s what happened in the case of Microsoft and IBM.” Molo then says, didn’t Microsoft become more prominent and important than IBM? Nadella agrees.
Nadella’s attitude is not notably different than it was on direct. We are talking about donating commute to OpenAI from Azure services. From a 1/12/18 email: “The 2016 deal, where they agreed to pay $10M for $60M in Azure services was projected at a $15M loss over 3 years, given assumed usage profile. They’ll have consumed all the usage in ½ that time.” The funny recurring theme here through the trial is the gaping maw of compute required is always bigger than whatever huge number people had projected. Interesting to know ahead of AI IPOs!
Nadella is being asked about possibly the most baller thing he’s ever said. “Below them” means compute. “Around them” means API. “Above them” means products like Copilot. “The question was being asked, what happens if OpenAI disappears, will everything crumble? So I was trying to reassure everyone,” he says. The problem was that until he said this to Kara Swisher, “the drama of what was going on was drowning out what the customers care about.”
He was being asked if at any point Musk contacted him to say that the OpenAI deals with Microsoft violated any agreement Musk had with OpenAI’s nonprofit. Musk did not. “Does he know how to contact you?” his lawyer, asked. “He does.”