In late November last year, as India faced Australia in the final of the Cricket World Cup, mega-fan Satya Nadella was distracted. He was dealing with a work crisis.
Nadella, who runs $3tn software giant Microsoft, had learned just days earlier that Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, the start-up in which Microsoft has invested $13bn, had been fired by his board in a surprise coup for not being “consistently candid”.
Caught unawares despite being OpenAI’s largest financial backer, Nadella moved quickly to fix the disruption. Once reassured Altman had not done anything egregious, he pushed first to hire and later reinstate the entrepreneur, in an attempt to restore stability at the start-up with which Microsoft’s future was now closely threaded.