{"id":258170,"date":"2025-10-29T06:42:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T06:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/258170\/"},"modified":"2025-10-29T06:42:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T06:42:08","slug":"satya-nadella-said-bill-gates-warned-against-investing-in-openai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/258170\/","title":{"rendered":"Satya Nadella Said Bill Gates Warned Against Investing in OpenAI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft’s early investments in OpenAI may seem like a no-brainer today, but Satya Nadella<\/a> says the company and its founder, Bill Gates<\/a>, saw the decision as a risk back then.<\/p>\n

Microsoft invested $1 billion<\/a> in OpenAI in 2019, less than four years after its founding. The company has since invested over $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker.<\/p>\n

But getting that first investment deal across the finish line wasn’t that straightforward, Nadella said in an interview with “TPBN,” a tech-focused YouTube show, on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

“Even at Microsoft, you kind of got to have to get a board approval to just go throw a billion dollars out there,” Nadella said.”But I must say it was not that hard to convince anyone that this is an important area and it’s going to be risky.”<\/p>\n

“In retrospect, who would have thought? I didn’t put in a billion dollars saying, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to be a hundred bagger,'” he continued.<\/p>\n

Nadella told TBPN that Gates was also wary when he wanted to invest in OpenAI back in 2019.<\/p>\n

“Remember this was a nonprofit, and I think Bill even said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to burn this billion dollars,'” Nadella said.<\/p>\n

“We kind of had a little bit of high risk tolerance, and we said we want to go and give this a shot,” he added.<\/p>\n

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Representatives for Nadella and Gates at Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n

OpenAI has come a long way since Microsoft took its first bet on it.<\/p>\n

The AI startup became a household name in November 2022 after it released an early demo of ChatGPT. The chatbot went viral on social media and added a million users within five days.<\/p>\n

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said at the company’s annual DevDay conference on October 6 that “more than 800 million people use ChatGPT every week.”<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it had completed its restructuring. Its nonprofit arm, OpenAI Foundation, will now oversee a new public benefit corporation, OpenAI Group PBC. With the changes, Microsoft holds a 27% stake<\/a>, valued at about $135 billion, in OpenAI’s for-profit business.<\/p>\n

Microsoft’s shares are up nearly 29% year to date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft’s early investments in OpenAI may seem like a no-brainer today, but Satya Nadella says the company and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258171,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[139564,15881,28,270,139562,18291,3426,926,1281,139563,30377,1283,16650,7047,11484,2394],"class_list":["post-258170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-annual-devday-conference","tag-bill-gates","tag-business","tag-business-insider","tag-chatgpt-maker","tag-comment","tag-company","tag-dollar","tag-microsoft","tag-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella","tag-nadella","tag-openai","tag-request","tag-sam-altman","tag-tuesday","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}