The beef between Sam Altman and Elon Musk now involves a CFO.
Altman’s OpenAI has hired Mike Liberatore, formerly CFO at Musk’s xAI, CNBC reported on Tuesday. Liberatore worked at xAI for just three months before departing in July of this year. Several other high-profile staff members have left xAI in recent weeks, including cofounder Igor Babuschkin and general counsel Robert Keele.
During his short tenure at xAI, Liberatore helped the company pursue data center expansion and raise $10 billion through a $5 billion debt sale and a $5 billion equity raise. Musk’s SpaceX contributed about half of the equity.
At OpenAI, Liberatore will have the title of business finance officer and report to CFO Sarah Friar. He’ll help craft the company’s strategy for “its massive infrastructure spending,” according to CNBC. Recently, OpenAI struck a deal to buy $300b worth of computing power from Oracle over a period of about five years. As the Wall Street Journal observed, the deal “far outstrips the startup’s current revenue.” OpenAI lost $5 billion last year, but said it had $10 billion in ARR this year.
Liberatore joins OpenAI at a time when the company, a nonprofit, says it’s getting closer to completing a transformation into a more typical for-profit company. The startup has wrangled with Microsoft, its primary funder, over the terms of the shift, and needs Microsoft to sign off on the change by the end of the year or lose $20 billion, CFO Dive reported.
Feuding founders: The hiring of Liberatore is just the latest twist in a longstanding feud between Musk and Altman. The two CEOs were once friends who cofounded OpenAI in 2015, but the bromance ultimately soured, and Musk founded competing startup xAI. He and wealthy backers made an unsuccessful bid to buy a controlling stake in OpenAI for $97 billion, and he’s sued to prevent OpenAI from becoming a for-profit company. Altman, for his part, has suggested Musk is jealous of OpenAI’s success. “I think fundamentally, this [feud] is about OpenAI doing really well,” he said on Bari Weiss’s podcast last year.
News built for finance pros
CFO Brew helps finance pros navigate their roles with insights into risk management, compliance, and strategy through our newsletter, virtual events, and digital guides.