As far as making money, Microsoft was in the mix from as early as 2016, offering OpenAI $60 million worth of compute on Azure in exchange for, among other things, the companies “evangelizing” one another. No one seemed into this kind of corporate back-scratching, and Musk wrote that it made him “nauseous.”
They ultimately ended up paying far more but with no obligation on either side. “Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft’s marketing bitch,” wrote Musk.