Nadella Testifies: Microsoft Earns $9.5 Billion from OpenAI Partnership

According to Beating Monitor, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella completed several hours of testimony on Monday during the same hearing, answering questions from attorneys for both sides regarding Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. The financial aspect was most direct. In video testimony played the same day, Microsoft’s enterprise development executive Michael Wetter revealed that, as of March 2025, Microsoft had generated $9.5 billion in cumulative revenue from its partnership with OpenAI, including an agreement under which OpenAI shares 20% of its revenue with Microsoft. Nadella said he was “very proud” to have taken the risk of investing in OpenAI when no one else dared, and denied that Microsoft’s investment was a donation. Internal emails from 2022 revealed Nadella’s deeper concerns: in one email to his executive team, he wrote, “We’re going to lose $4 billion next year!!!” and demanded renegotiations to gain access to OpenAI’s AI know-how. In another email, he wrote a more blunt statement: “I don’t want to be IBM and let OpenAI become Microsoft.” Musk’s lawyer pressed him on the meaning of this remark, and Nadella acknowledged that IBM had once signed a non-exclusive deal that allowed Microsoft to rise—and that he ultimately surpassed IBM. Regarding the 2023 firing of Altman, Nadella mocked the board’s actions as “amateur city,” saying he never understood the specifics of what was meant by Altman’s alleged “lack of transparency.” He denied pressuring the board to reinstate Altman, but testimony showed he privately discussed 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 had never directly expressed dissatisfaction to him about Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, adding, “We have each other’s phone numbers.”