Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spent hours on the witness stand Monday, fielding questions from both sides' lawyers about the company's partnership with OpenAI.
Let's start with the money. In a video deposition played the same day, Microsoft corporate development executive Michael Wetter revealed that as of March 2025, the partnership had generated $9.5 billion in cumulative revenue for Microsoft — including an agreement that gives Microsoft 20% of OpenAI's revenue. Nadella said he's "very proud" that Microsoft took the risky bet on OpenAI when no one else would, and denied that the investment was a donation.
But internal emails from 2022 exposed Nadella's deeper anxieties. In one, he told his executive team they were "on track to lose $4 billion next year!!!" and demanded renegotiation to get access to OpenAI's AI know-how. In another, he wrote something even blunter: "I don't want to be IBM while OpenAI becomes Microsoft." When Elon Musk's lawyer pressed him on that line, Nadella acknowledged that IBM had signed a non-exclusive deal that let Microsoft rise — and that Microsoft had ultimately far surpassed IBM.
On the 2023 ouster of Sam Altman, Nadella called the board's handling "amateur city," saying he never fully understood what Altman was supposedly "not consistently candid" about. He denied forcing the board to reinstate Altman, but testimony showed he discussed a list of 14 potential board candidates with his deputies and vetoed at least two — including former Google Cloud head Diane Greene, citing competitive conflicts with Google.
Nadella also confirmed that Musk never directly complained to him about Microsoft's investment in OpenAI. "We have each other's phone numbers," he said.