Liberatore will join the team responsible for overseeing OpenAI’s massive infrastructure spending.
OpenAI has hired former xAI finance chief Mike Liberatore as its business finance officer, according to a CNBC report published late Monday.
Liberatore, who left Elon Musk’s AI firm in July, after just three months on the job, will start on Tuesday.
He will report to CFO Sarah Friar and work with Greg Brockman’s team, which manages the contracts and capital behind OpenAI’s compute strategy, a company spokesperson told CNBC.
The development comes as AI companies are spending billions of dollars on compute capacity and funneling investor money into the development of new AI services. Meta recently hired 50 top AI engineers with high compensation in a few months, mostly from rivals such as OpenAI.
Meanwhile, Musk has sued OpenAI and Apple over what he alleges is an illegal collusion between the two companies for prominently featuring ChatGPT on the App Store while leaving out his company’s rival feature, Grok, developed by xAI.
Musk also reportedly sued a former xAI engineer who joined OpenAI recently for allegedly leaking trade secrets related to its Grok, according to a Reuters report last month.
For OpenAI, the financial hiring is a crucial move as it moves closer towards a corporate restructuring. The AI heavyweight will establish a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), which will receive the majority of the assets from OpenAI’s non-profit entity.
At xAI, Liberatore helped arrange a $5 billion debt sale alongside a $5 billion equity raise backed partly by SpaceX, and approved major data center expansion plans, according to the CNBC report.
He has previously spent nearly nine years at Airbnb, and before that worked in senior finance roles at eBay and PayPal.
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