OpenAI hires former xAI CFO as Altman-Musk rivalry escalates (www.cnbc.com)

OpenAI has hired Mike Liberatore, who briefly served as finance chief at Elon Musk’s xAI, as business finance officer to help manage the company’s soaring compute and infrastructure spending. Liberatore left xAI in July after about three months; while there he helped arrange roughly $10 billion in financing (a $5 billion debt sale plus about $5 billion in equity partly backed by SpaceX) and signed off on major data‑center expansion plans. At OpenAI he will report to CFO Sarah Friar and work closely with Greg Brockman’s team, which runs contracts and capital strategy for the company’s GPU and cloud commitments. The move matters both operationally and symbolically. Operationally, Liberatore brings hands‑on experience structuring large-scale funding, vendor deals and data‑center buildouts—skills that directly affect how OpenAI secures GPUs, negotiates long‑term supply and manages multibillion‑dollar compute budgets. Symbolically, the hire intensifies the public feud between Sam Altman and Musk: it transfers a senior finance executive from xAI to OpenAI amid ongoing litigation and strategic rivalry. Expect tighter scrutiny of procurement strategy, potential leverage in vendor negotiations, and questions about competitive intelligence as both camps scale hardware and capital plans.