"Microsoft Expects $92 Billion Profit from OpenAI Investment"

It has been revealed that Microsoft aimed for a profit of $92 billion from its early investment in OpenAI.

Reuters Yonhap News Agency

According to Bloomberg News on May 11 (local time), this target was included in an internal Microsoft planning document drafted in early 2023. The document was made public during the lawsuit filed by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, against OpenAI and Microsoft, held at the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California.

OpenAI's corporate value was around $1 billion in 2019. This increased to approximately $29 billion in 2023, surpassed about $500 billion last year, and recently soared to $852 billion. Microsoft had invested about $13 billion in OpenAI as of early 2023. As of October last year, the value of its stake was estimated at around $135 billion.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, explained in court, "We were able to achieve good results because we took risks."

In the lawsuit filed in 2024, CEO Musk claimed that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Greg Brockman, co-founder, betrayed the founding purpose of OpenAI—which was established as a non-profit organization for the benefit of humanity—by taking actions to operate it as a for-profit company. CEO Musk also argued that Microsoft assisted in this betrayal.

OpenAI, Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft have all denied any illegal conduct. They countered that Musk's claims are nothing more than baseless attacks aimed at promoting his own artificial intelligence (AI) startup, xAI, which was launched in 2023.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.