Microsoft Bet $13 Billion on OpenAI to Beat Google—Then Sam Altman Got Fired

Описание: For 20 years, Microsoft tried to beat Google at search and failed spectacularly—Bing never broke 3% market share while Google dominated with 92%, printing over $100 billion annually in search ad revenue that Microsoft desperately wanted. Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014 with Microsoft dying (missed mobile entirely, Windows Phone a joke), killed the failing phone business, bet everything on Azure cloud, and succeeded—but search remained impossible to crack until 2019 when he met Sam Altman and invested $1 billion in OpenAI. November 2022: OpenAI launches ChatGPT, hits 100 million users in 2 months (fastest-growing app ever), and suddenly search looks obsolete—why click through links when AI answers directly? Nadella immediately invested another $10 billion (total: $13 billion), integrated ChatGPT into Bing, Office, Windows as "Copilot," and Microsoft's stock hit $3 trillion as investors believed they'd won the AI race. But November 17, 2023 exposed the fatal flaw: OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman, and within hours Nadella offered to hire the entire company because Microsoft controls nothing—they've spent $13 billion on a partner they don't own, their entire AI future depends on Sam Altman staying, and if OpenAI implodes or goes independent, Microsoft is back to being the company that almost changed the world but didn't. This is strategic dependency at its most dangerous: Nadella made the smartest bet to finally beat Google, but he bet on someone else's company, and now Microsoft's fate is tied to a CEO who was fired and rehired in 5 days.