News
OpenAI Taps Former xAI CFO to Steer Business Finance Amid AI Talent Wars
- By John K. Waters
- 09/16/2025
OpenAI has brought in a finance executive from one of its fiercest rivals. The company confirmed Tuesday that Mike Liberatore, the former chief financial officer at Elon Musk’s xAI, has joined as OpenAI’s business finance officer. He will report to CFO Sarah Friar and work closely with Greg Brockman’s team on the company’s most pressing bottleneck: compute.
Liberatore’s mandate is less about accounting and more about survival. OpenAI’s biggest constraint isn’t customers or ambition—it’s the GPUs that power its models. The new role situates him at the nexus of capital planning, infrastructure build-out, and the delicate negotiations required to secure scarce AI hardware.
The move highlights just how fluid—and competitive—the AI executive labor market has become. Liberatore’s résumé is a cross-section of the current tech economy: a former Airbnb executive, he briefly served as xAI’s finance chief, helping arrange a $5 billion debt raise and a matching $5 billion equity investment before his July exit. Now, just weeks later, he’s landed across the aisle at OpenAI.
It’s also another flare-up in the slow-burn feud between Musk and the company he co-founded. Musk has accused OpenAI of betraying its original mission to serve humanity, suing the company and Sam Altman last year. OpenAI countersued in April, alleging harassment. Meanwhile, the two firms are racing not just on product roadmaps but also for the engineers, researchers, and executives who can sustain billion-dollar infrastructure bets.
For OpenAI, Liberatore’s appointment underscores the stakes of scaling safely and quickly. GPUs have become the new oil fields of the AI boom, and finance officers like Liberatore are now tasked with turning access to compute into a competitive advantage. In a fight where the margin of error is slim and the costs astronomical, his job is to make sure the math keeps working.
About the Author
John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at [email protected].