Which leader? Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
First, Nadella now rivals Apple’s CEO Tim Cook in the race for which CEO has proven himself most able brilliantly to succeed a legendary founder. In Cook’s case Steve Jobs. In Nadella’s case Bill Gates.
Second, taking advantage of the seismic shakeup that I wrote about two days ago, Nadella seized the day. He lost not a nanosecond adding to Microsoft already formidable team OpenAI’s cofounders, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman.
To be clear it’s all rather incestuous. Microsoft was one of OpenAI’s original backers and it retains a good chunk of the company. Still, while the two companies are related, they’re not one and the same. Altman and Brockman now owe their primary allegiance not to OpenAI but to Microsoft. Suffice to point out the former’s loss is the latter’s gain.