OpenAI hires former xAI finance chief as rivalry with Musk intensifies

OpenAI has hired Mike Liberatore, the short-tenured former chief financial officer of Elon Musk's xAI, to serve as the company's business finance officer and oversee its large-scale infrastructure spending, the company confirmed.

Liberatore, who left xAI in July after roughly three months on the job, is scheduled to begin Tuesday and will report to OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar. He will work closely with Greg Brockman’s team to manage contracts and capital tied to OpenAI’s cloud computing strategy and other infrastructure commitments.

Liberatore was one of several high-profile departures at xAI this summer. Other exits included the company’s general counsel, Robert Keele; senior lawyer Raghu Rao; and co-founder Igor Babuschkin. The departures have coincided with public problems for xAI’s chatbot Grok, though the companies involved did not link the staffing moves to product issues. Neither Liberatore nor representatives for xAI and OpenAI immediately responded to requests for comment.

Before joining xAI, Liberatore spent nearly nine years at Airbnb and held senior finance roles at SquareTrade, eBay and PayPal. At xAI, he played a role in arranging a $5 billion debt sale that Morgan Stanley helped structure in June and in a $5 billion equity raise in which SpaceX was reported to have contributed nearly half of the capital. He also led aspects of xAI’s data-center expansion near Memphis, Tennessee.

The hire comes amid rising tensions between OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Musk. Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015 but later cut ties with the group, has since challenged the company’s governance and legal structure. He has mounted legal opposition to OpenAI’s plans to restructure into a for-profit entity and earlier this year made an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid to acquire the company, a proposal the OpenAI board quickly rejected.

OpenAI last week said its nonprofit owner would continue to exercise oversight of the company and retain an equity stake the company said is worth more than $100 billion as part of its restructuring. The announcement followed a year of public sparring between Musk and Altman, including sharp comments exchanged in interviews and posts on social platforms. Altman has publicly criticized Musk’s temperament in interviews, while Musk has used social media to deride Altman.

OpenAI has been aggressively expanding its investments in computing and cloud infrastructure. Investors have recently valued the company at about $500 billion, and OpenAI has announced large-scale spending plans with cloud partners, including a multiyear Oracle arrangement tied to roughly $300 billion in cloud commitments.

OpenAI said the new hire will bolster its capacity to manage the complex financing and contracting that accompany its infrastructure growth, particularly as the company scales compute and data-center operations to support its suite of AI products. Liberatore’s appointment is the latest sign of elevated competition for technical and financial talent in the fast-growing AI industry, where startups and established firms alike are investing heavily in compute, data-center capacity and cloud partnerships.