While OpenAI is now worth a jaw-dropping $500 billion, it wasn't always the world's most valuable private company. The AI evolution seems to have crept up on us overnight, and while it's hard to imagine a time before ChatGPT, it's only been in our lives since November 2022.
It's been a long road to get here, though OpenAI is still dealing with public fallout between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, a mounting number of wrongful death lawsuits, and worried investors amid talk of massive financial losses in 2026.
OpenAI remains a Goliath in the world of artificial intelligence, which is partly down to a leg-up from Microsoft back in 2019. With Microsoft being only one of four companies to cross the $4 trillon market cap line, they don't come much bigger.
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However, it was nearly a very different story, with Bill Gates apparently telling Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that his early investment into OpenAI was the wrong decision to make.
Speaking to the tech-focused TBPN (via Fortune), Nadella recalled: "Remember this was a nonprofit, and I think Bill [Gates] even said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to burn this billion dollars'."
Despite this sage advice from Microsoft's co-founder, this new guard remained determined.
Even though Nadella would require board approval due to $1 billion not being small change for anyone, he admitted: "It was not that hard to convince anyone that this is an important area.
"We kind of had a little bit of high risk tolerance, and we said, ‘We want to go and give this a shot'."
While Microsoft didn't reply to Fortune's request for comment, the outlet says that the tech giant saw an investment in OpenAI as a way to muscle into the market and promote the AI abilities of its own Azure cloud computing platform.
$1 billion ended up being a relative drop in the ocean, as Microsoft ended up investing a whopping $13 million into OpenAI.
Looking back at his exchange with Gates, Nadella continued: "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'."
The gamble came good when an OpenAI restructuring saw Microsoft awarded a 27% stake in the company.
Despite Elon Musk coming for Microsoft amid allegations that this same 27% stake means it's worth around $135 billion, it's also struck a deal that will see OpenAI purchase $250 billion of Azure services.
Microsoft has come under fire for its pivot toward AI, with a series of mass layoffs coming in the immediate aftermath of a promised $80 billion investment into building data centers in 2025.
Gates has also appeared to change his mind on AI, memorably agreeing to a $50 billion deal between the Gates Foundation and OpenAI.
Still, the AI investments continue to come from all sides. Nadella was recently promoting the advantages of artificial intelligence at the Microsoft AI Tour London event, saying that working with agents should be compared to working with an 'infinite set of minds'. Things could've been very different if the company CEO had listened to Gates all those years ago, but as they say, the rest...is (tech) history.