However, in this article, International Finance will discuss in detail SoftBank’s rush to forge partnerships with OpenAI and the American tech industry in general, as the ongoing AI boom is also witnessing heavy spending on data centres. In January, OpenAI and SoftBank announced their roadmap to invest $500 million each in California-based SB Energy (a SoftBank-owned company) to expand data centre and power infrastructure for their Stargate initiative. SB Energy will build and operate OpenAI’s previously announced 1.2-gigawatt data centre site in Milam County, Texas.

Talking about Stargate, it is a $500 billion multi-year initiative to build AI data centres for training and inference, backed by major investors including Oracle. SoftBank’s aggressive spending spree on the data centre front comes amid the tech companies’ mad rush to secure their power infrastructure. Energy access is becoming a critical constraint on AI expansion, with the push for larger and more numerous data centres driving electricity demand higher.

SoftBank will also be acquiring Florida-based digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge Group in a deal valued at $4 billion. Through this, the Japanese company will be penetrating the digital infrastructure segment further, aligning with the vision of its billionaire founder, Masayoshi Son, who has made the United States’ AI boom his investment target. He wants to capitalise on surging demand for the computing capacity that underpins AI applications.

DigitalBridge invests in digital infrastructure sectors such as data centres, cell towers, fibre networks, small-cell systems and edge infrastructure. The company, which as of September 2025 possesses around $108 billion in assets, making it one of the largest dedicated investors in the digital ecosystem, also has a Stargate link.

It, along with OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi-based tech investor MGX, is investing billions of dollars in the project, under which five new computing sites across Texas, New Mexico and Ohio will have a combined power capacity of about seven gigawatts.

Building an AI war chest

Masayoshi Son’s latest interview with The Times Magazine gave a sneak peek of what is going through his mind, in terms of SoftBank’s road ahead in the AI domain. After making a fortune in software and transferring that success into domains like telecoms and a raft of tech ventures, Son is now preparing SoftBank’s $180 billion war chest for AI.

Be it taking control of chip firms Arm, Graphcore and Ampere Computing, as well as self-driving car start-up Wayve, or the investments into Intel and OpenAI, all of them have one thing in common: Son’s emphasis on artificial superintelligence (ASI), which he envisions becoming “10,000 times smarter than humans within a decade.”

“ASI combined with physical AI (including humanoid robotics) will comprise 10% of global GDP in 10 to 15 years, followed by 30% over 30 years,” Son predicted.

Masayoshi Son is known for following a high-risk, even higher-leveraged investment style that has courted both success and disasters. While the $20 million investment in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (worth close to $200 billion at its peak) gave the SoftBank boss a sort of legendary status, the $18.5 billion he pumped into the now-bankrupt office-sharing venture WeWork also got listed among history’s most bizarre moves.

However, the ongoing AI boom has given Son another opportunity to be a risk-taker. SoftBank shares hit a record high in October 2025, briefly propelling Son to once again become the richest man in Japan. However, he has got a bigger role now: spearheading Silicon Valley’s bet to scale up US data centres and AI infrastructure, thereby writing the rulebook of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0).

The SoftBank boss has also reportedly proposed a vast $1 trillion AI and robotics complex in Arizona, dubbed “Project Crystal Land,” that will also incorporate a free-trade zone alongside Taiwan’s chipmaking giant TSMC. By tapping into the Donald Trump Administration’s appetite for big numbers, as well as the clamour to reshore chipmaking and reassert American tech leadership against China, Son has pivoted SoftBank as an essential partner toward revamping US AI infrastructure.

And the investment vehicle supercharging SoftBank’s AI pivot is its “Vision Fund.” The entity, apart from being a steady investor in AI companies, including OpenAI, holds stakes in chip designer Arm, along with companies involved in robotics and autonomous vehicles. As of December 2025, through the fund’s strategic investments, the Japanese tech conglomerate has remained a profit-making machine, that too for four consecutive quarters.

In the October-December quarter alone, the venture reported a net profit of 248.6 billion yen (USD 1.62 billion), in a stark reversal of the net loss of 369 billion yen which it had to undergo in the same quarter in 2024. It seems like OpenAI’s rising valuation will also bode well for the conglomerate’s earnings, despite market worries about the risk of overexposure to a single firm.

In March 2026 itself, S&P Global lowered its outlook for SoftBank Group to negative from stable, saying further investments in the Sam Altman-led firm may hurt the Japanese conglomerate’s liquidity and the credit quality of its assets. However, it seems Son doesn’t have immediate plans to move away from the OpenAI bet.

However, the same bet comes at a cost. In November 2025, the SoftBank boss had to take the hard call of liquidating the entire stake ($32.1 million to be precise) in American chipmaking giant NVIDIA to free up investment worth $5.83 billion, along with part of a T-Mobile stake worth $9.17 billion. It wasn’t an easy call for Son, given that Vision Fund was an early backer of NVIDIA, apart from both ventures having a deep relationship, with the tech conglomerate involved in several AI ventures that rely on NVIDIA’s technology, including the Stargate one.

When Masayoshi Son broke his silence on the NVIDIA stake sale, he said, “I respect Jensen (NVIDIA CEO), I respect NVIDIA so much, I don’t want to sell a single share. I just had more need for money to invest in OpenAI, invest in our opportunities, so I was crying to sell NVIDIA shares. If I had more money, of course, I would want to keep NVIDIA shares, all the time, any time.”

Maverick since childhood

Born as the grandchild of Korean immigrants in a small town on Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu, Masayoshi Son had a humble childhood, living in a shack on a plot of unregistered land. At the age of 16, he read a book written by legendary Japanese businessman Den Fujita, the iconic figure who brought McDonald’s to Japan.

Then he made 60 long-distance phone calls with one intention: to meet the businessman himself. Despite repeated rejections, Son went to Tokyo and turned up uninvited at the McDonald’s head office. He was eventually given a 15-minute audience with Fujita, who gave one piece of advice to the teenager that changed his life forever, which was “focus on future technologies like computers.” It is worth mentioning that Fujita later sat on the SoftBank board.

Masayoshi Son then moved to the United States, completing his high school education at California High School, followed by a course in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. However, one task was quietly shaping Son’s entrepreneurial destiny, dedicating five minutes every day to thinking about inventions and filling hundreds of notebooks.

Son eventually ended up collaborating with Berkeley tutors to invent the world’s first electronic translator, which he later sold to Sharp Corporation. He then started a business importing second-hand arcade game machines from Japan.

Despite setting up a successful business in the United States, Son returned to his homeland to keep a promise he made to his mother. In 1981, the 24-year-old Son established SoftBank. While SoftBank started as a software wholesaler to support the then-upcoming PC industry, in 1982, TIME named the computer its “Machine of the Year,” giving the youngster’s business a solid purpose.

However, he was diagnosed with Hepatitis B. Given three to five years to live, Son took the challenge head-on and underwent pioneering treatment that saved his life. The whole episode only made him more self-confident. And it showed in his rapid rise since then.

In the 1990s, Masayoshi Son invested $3 billion in 800 tech start-ups. In 1996, he paid $100 million for 33% of Yahoo! Three years later, he sold off a chunk of the shares for a huge profit but still retained a 28% stake worth $8.4 billion. He zeroed in on one investment strategy, which is issuing SoftBank bonds to borrow money at rates cheaper than banks.

Then arrived the ill-famed dot-com bubble. During the phase, Son’s net worth used to surge by $10 billion every week, so much so that in February 2000, the SoftBank boss briefly unseated Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the world’s richest person for three days. However, when the bubble burst later that year, SoftBank shed 97% of its value, and Son had to suffer losses worth $70 billion.

However, the beauty of time is that it changes. Alibaba, now an established Chinese conglomerate, was a relatively unknown e-commerce startup in 2000. It got a $20 million bet from Son, and as the company went public in 2014, the same stake became worth $75 billion. As Son sold it, it doubled again, becoming one of his most profitable investments of all time, apart from creating the “Midas Touch” narrative about Son’s bet-taking capabilities.

Telecom investments and blunders

After recovering from the dot-com bubble disaster, Masayoshi Son set his eyes on the broadband segment. However, things weren’t smooth initially, as SoftBank had to struggle to get regulatory approvals in Japan to set up its industry subsidiary.

Things went to the extent where Son stormed into an official’s office at Japan’s telecommunications ministry, clutching a cheap cigarette lighter. While recollecting that episode in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Son remembered saying to the official, “This is the end. If you don’t help me, I’m going to pour gasoline all over myself right here and set myself on fire with this $1 lighter.”

The situation got better in 2006 when, after acquiring Vodafone’s Japanese subsidiary, the rebranded SoftBank Mobile emerged as a key player in Japanese telecoms. Son successfully persuaded Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to give him the exclusive rights to market the iPhone, history’s most successful consumer electronic product, when it debuted in 2007.

In 2013, he purchased Sprint and turned things around for the struggling US telecom provider before merging it with T-Mobile in 2020, disrupting the AT&T and Verizon duopoly. Although Son is known as a hands-off investor, the Sprint episode was the best example of him rolling up his sleeves and getting things done.

In 2017, he formed the SoftBank Vision Fund with over $100 billion in capital. The entity still maintains its position as the world’s largest private equity fund. He secured some $45 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) following a 45-minute meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The fund’s strategy was simple: invest a minimum of $100 million to juice each startup to market dominance by blowing competitors out of the water, and Masayoshi Son called it “blitzscaling.” The entity, by 2019, pumped $76.3 billion into companies like NVIDIA, Uber, WeWork, Paytm, Ola and Flipkart, most of which are market giants in their respective fields.

In 2019, SoftBank launched Vision Fund 2 with a touted value of $108 billion. However, there was a setback, as the entity reportedly managed to secure a paltry $30 billion, mostly self-funded. The original Vision Fund also underperformed, as in 2021 it posted record losses of $27.4 billion amid the haemorrhage of tech stocks. The Ukraine war, COVID-19 lockdowns, and Beijing’s crackdown on its tech giants, many of which were backed by SoftBank, pulled down investor confidence.

And who can forget the WeWork disaster? During his high-profile visit to the United States in December 2016, in which Son met President-Elect Donald Trump, he also interacted with Adam Neumann, the founder of the co-working venture. The deal, famously drawn up during a 12-minute meeting followed by a car ride, saw the SoftBank boss handing Neumann $4 billion. The Japanese conglomerate then went on to pump in another $14.5 billion.

However, in 2023 the bet backfired as WeWork declared bankruptcy, after a planned IPO went awry, followed by investor doubts about its governance, business model and profitability.

The episode affected Masayoshi Son, as he announced SoftBank would adopt a “defensive” position by being conservative when it came to the pace of new investments. Not only did the Japanese conglomerate witness an exodus of executives, but Son also ended up telling investors that he was “embarrassed and ashamed of himself for being so elated by big profits in the past.”

WeWork was not the only failed bet for SoftBank, as it also faced criticism for unsuccessful investments in dog-walking service Wag, robot pizza chain Zume and, most importantly, payments service Wirecard, which collapsed in 2020 after being named in Germany’s biggest post-war accounting fraud, where €1.9 billion in reported cash was found to be non-existent.

Around the same time, Greensill, a SoftBank-backed supply chain finance firm in the United Kingdom and Australia, also shut down amid illegal lobbying accusations.

The big gamble

Stargate is a huge bet for Son and the wider American tech sector, as through this, the world’s largest economy is looking to enhance its AI infrastructure to 10 gigawatts by 2029, with Texas, Michigan, New Mexico and Wisconsin being key data centre hubs.

However, economists and investors believe that the current AI infrastructure, far cheaper than Stargate, already fails to generate adequate revenue compared to its cost. Also, newer AI models will likely be more power-efficient, rendering massive data centres obsolete.

Data centres are also known for straining energy grids, leading to higher operational as well as environmental costs, undermining economic viability.

Masayoshi Son disagrees with the detractors, as he envisions 10 times more AI chips being deployed in each three-year cycle. Over time, these chips themselves will become 10 times more potent, while AI models, on their part, will ramp up productivity by a factor of 10.

“That’s 1,000x in three years. Nine years with three generations is 1,000,000,000x. It’s a huge, huge difference,” he told TIME.

Another concern of critics is that the collaboration between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank could result in a cartel that stifles innovation while inflating costs.

Taking a different view, Son remarked, “For the AI race, it requires hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into the data centres, buying chips, integrating chips and training the models. It’s very, very costly, so it will naturally be concentrated into several very capable companies in terms of talent and capitalisation.”

Stargate is also a prime example of geopolitical and technological rivalries finding a common link: Washington’s desire (spooked by DeepSeek’s rise) to beat Beijing in the so-called AI “arms race.” Korean-Japanese Son has picked his side here.

Or call it Son’s revenge, as Beijing’s regulatory crackdown on its tech industry in 2021 caused stocks to plummet, leading to a financial bloodbath for SoftBank.

He told TIME, “I have stopped investing in China. Zero. I’m now focused on investing in the US.”

However, he still has great admiration for Chinese business acumen, reflected in his words: “You cannot underestimate China’s crowd of young entrepreneurs, young scientists. They are for real.”

Talking about Stargate, out of the total $500 billion to be spent over four years, some $100 billion was to be invested “immediately,” to create 100,000 permanent jobs. However, only roughly $10 billion has so far been deployed in the Texas city of Abilene, where some 7,000 temporary construction jobs reportedly have been created, providing a mixed bag to the local economy in the form of growing job openings and a housing crisis.

Two elements from the dot-com era, fibre optic cable and 3G infrastructure, went on to prove invaluable over the years. However, the same can’t be said about data centres (warehouses packed with GPUs), as these infrastructures may not enjoy such longevity given the industry’s emphasis on developing next-generation AI that will be more energy-friendly.

Has Masayoshi Son, who has repeatedly risen like a phoenix after multiple investment failures, taken a big gamble about Stargate and American AI ambitions in general? Only time will tell.

The post Stargate: Masayoshi Son’s next big bet appeared first on International Finance.

Wayve, which received funding from SoftBank Group and Nvidia, opened a testing and development centre in Japan a few months back. Nissan, which launched its ProPilot system in 2016 and rolled out a second-generation version in 2019 to assist with highway driving, has not yet announced which models will come equipped with the next-generation driver-assistance system. However, Wayve is playing a crucial role in developing the Japanese automaker’s upcoming driver-assistance system.

Meet The New Player

The British start-up has quickly become one of the best-funded companies in the UK, while also gaining recognition as one of the few artificial intelligence pioneers based in the country. According to Alex Kendall, the founder of Wayve, who spoke with The Guardian, in addition to Nissan, the company is working with large manufacturers in Europe, North America, and Japan.

In fact, chip giant Nvidia recently signed a letter of intent for a possible USD 500 million investment in Wayve’s next funding round. The start-up has already raised USD 1.3 billion from investors, including Japan’s SoftBank, to fund its expansion in the United States, Germany, Israel, and Japan, as well as in London.

Nvidia is already providing one or two chips in each car using Wayve technology, and many more in the data centres used to train Wayve’s foundation model on vast amounts of driving data, including videos of drivers encountering real-world models.

Kendall founded Wayve in 2017 after studying deep learning for computer vision and robotics at the University of Cambridge. He told The Guardian, “We want to build a trillion-dollar company,” while adding that the company had reached “a real inflection point in the capabilities of this technology” that allowed it to learn rapidly how to navigate Tokyo’s crowded streets.

Wayve uses AI models that learn how to drive by ingesting huge amounts of video and driving data, while spotting patterns it can then replicate. This approach contrasts with some other driverless technology companies, which tried to program explicit rules into their systems. Nissan was already developing its own autonomous driving technology, including in London trials, but the opportunity to use Wayve’s expertise led to the breakthrough the British start-up needed.

Robotaxis controlled by rival software are already operating in some American and Chinese cities, although companies have faced problems with cars occasionally being unable to navigate unusual obstacles.

Wayve cars use a combination of cameras and radar, similar to the Nissan cars, which also employ a more expensive lidar laser sensor. Kendall said this would provide “a level of redundancy” in an affordable manner.

A Unique Technology

The company, which has a distinguished list of investors such as Microsoft, SoftBank, Uber, Virgin Group, Nvidia, and Eclipse, has based its driver-assistance system on the “AV2.0 Approach,” which is pioneering the start-up’s end-to-end AI Driving Model. This replaces the modular “sense-plan-act” architecture of the traditional AV1.0 approach with a single neural network trained on diverse data to convert raw sensor inputs into safe driving outputs.

The technology learns driving skills from raw, unlabelled data using self-supervised learning, thereby eliminating the need to curate expensive and time-consuming labelled datasets. Additionally, AV2.0 doesn’t rely on HD maps, which enables seamless expansion to new geographies through data-driven adaptations. AV2.0 allows Wayve to think differently about sensors.

This data-first approach is flexible in terms of sensor selection, giving OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) the freedom to choose hardware based on their needs. AV2.0 can adapt to operate on any type of vehicle, from passenger cars to delivery vans. Advances made in either vehicle type directly benefit the other.

AV2.0 has introduced a rapid, continuous, and seamless fleet-learning loop: recording data, training models, evaluating performance, and deploying updated models. The “Fleet Learning Loop” efficiently gathers real-world driving data from diverse fleets, processes it in a cloud-based training infrastructure, and converts it into refined driving capabilities.

The mechanism has been optimally designed to support the transition from “eyes-on” driving functions to “eyes-off” as driving data exposure builds verifiably robust automated driving capabilities.

Following the philosophy of “Responsible Model Development,” AV2.0 implements MLOps workflows for responsible model development, utilising innovative tools, processes, and pipelines to build, train, and deploy foundation models. Before “On-Road Trials,” the start-up rigorously tests its AI driving models across a vast array of simulated driving scenarios for rapid and comprehensive evaluation.

Under the “Safety 2.0 Framework,” Wayve has introduced a revolutionary approach that addresses safety through the lens of deep world understanding. Unlike traditional methods, “Safety 2.0” acknowledges that true safety comes from an AI that, like a human driver, interprets the driving environment naturally. The result has been the creation of an AI system that inherently comprehends the intricacies of the world and drives behaviours for safe navigation.

Utilising Generative AI, Wayve has developed a high-fidelity, predictive world model that understands the implications of the vehicle’s actions and ensures safe responses to other road users. The model’s understanding can be used to prevent unsafe actions. Wayve’s end-to-end (e2e) model architecture and active learning processes have been optimised to produce effective, fluent, and safe driving behaviours from unlabelled driving videos, showcasing strong generalisation across various geographies, vehicles, and sensors. The entire model can be further enhanced with multimodal data sources that provide additional information.

New methods have been created for dataset introspection and control, while harnessing the emergent concepts generated by the AI and transforming them into a framework for deeper analysis. Safety 2.0 also carries comprehensive datasets for diverse driving scenarios and filters out low-quality and risky scenarios.

The model also has its own introspection method, where it uses natural language and other information to evaluate the AI’s decision-making process. OEMs also get control and visibility over their data assets and learning processes to ensure that Wayve’s AI models achieve the highest safety standards.

Advanced AI Making Driving Safe

Wayve’s “AI Driver” is transforming driving automation for foreign carmakers. The start-up’s mapless, hardware-agnostic solution enables efficient software upgrades, unlocking advanced levels of automation from L2+ to L4 as Wayve’s core AI model evolves. The approach resonates with automakers’ goals of ensuring innovation, safety, adaptability, and scalability when fielding driver-assistance systems.

The platform is designed for universal compatibility, allowing straightforward integration into any vehicle. This empowers OEMs to easily adopt automated features across their entire vehicle portfolio, promoting a cohesive driving experience across the lineup.

The unique mapless AI solution also facilitates effortless adaptation to any environment, eliminating the need for detailed high-definition maps. This simplifies global deployment and lowers costs in the process, allowing for scalable expansion of automated driving technology. Wayve’s “AI Driver” has also been future-proofed by enabling seamless over-the-air updates to support different levels of driving automation.

The “AI Driver” offers a comprehensive suite that includes foundational driving models, safety mechanisms, APIs, data collection, and cloud-based monitoring and configuration infrastructure. This platform is engineered to optimise performance, configuration, and safety, meeting the high standards of the automotive industry, including hands-free driver assistance day or night, from city to highway, with minimal hardware requirements. The entire package of comprehensive warning and active safety systems has been made global NCAP (New Car Assessment Programme)-compliant.

To scale globally, Wayve has set very tough qualification parameters for its AI Driver: it must perform in places it’s never seen before, with no region-specific retraining and no HD maps. The start-up has launched the “AI-500 Roadshow,” a bold plan to take its single foundation model to 500 cities by the end of 2025.

Image Credits: Wayve

The post Start-up of the Week: Nissan leverages Wayve’s AI for new driver assistance appeared first on International Finance.

Aguilar, who leads the Los Angeles–based nonprofit LatinoProsperity, feared the move would betray OpenAI’s founding mission to “benefit all of humanity” by empowering investors to reap unlimited private profits.

That moment spurred Aguilar to action. He began speed-dialling allies in California’s philanthropic and civil rights circles, determined to scrutinise OpenAI’s restructuring plan and its implications for the public interest.

Over the ensuing months, a broad coalition of more than 50 advocacy organisations coalesced: labour unions, community foundations, tech accountability groups. All rallied around a shared concern that OpenAI’s transformation from a nonprofit lab into a profit-driven corporate behemoth could set a dangerous precedent.

By January 2025, they were urging California’s attorney general to intervene, warning that billions in charitable assets (the ones intended for the public good) were at risk of being effectively privatised.

What had begun as a little-noticed corporate restructuring proposal was quickly snowballing into a high-stakes battle over the future of OpenAI, the governance of artificial intelligence, and the integrity of the nonprofit system itself.

From idealistic lab to tech titan

OpenAI’s origin story is steeped in idealism. The San Francisco research lab launched in late 2015 as a nonprofit venture backed by tech luminaries including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who together pledged $1 billion to fund it. At the time, concerns were growing that AI development was dominated by a few big tech firms driven by profit.

OpenAI’s founders vowed a different path: build advanced AI in the service of all humanity and share the research openly. Its charter emphasised long-term social benefits over financial gain, even declaring that when conflict arises, the nonprofit mission would “take precedence” over any obligation to generate profit.

For several years, OpenAI operated like an AI think tank, publishing cutting-edge research and freely sharing its code. But as the race to develop powerful AI accelerated, the organisation faced a dilemma. Training world-class AI models required far more computing power (and money) than its initial philanthropic funding could support.

By 2019, OpenAI’s leadership made a controversial pivot. They set up a hybrid structure by creating a for-profit arm, OpenAI Global, under the umbrella of the original nonprofit, OpenAI. This allowed them to attract venture capital while ostensibly keeping the nonprofit’s oversight and mission intact.

This compromise introduced a novel “capped-profit” model. Investors could earn returns on their money, but those returns were capped at a certain multiple. After that point, the nonprofit would retain surplus value to fund its mission. The idea was to access billions in Silicon Valley capital without fully sacrificing OpenAI’s altruistic DNA.

In practice, the hybrid model allowed OpenAI to tap deep-pocketed backers. Microsoft alone poured in a reported $13 billion (across multiple funding rounds) for a share of OpenAI’s technology and profits.

By late 2023, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had become a global sensation, drawing over half a billion weekly users and solidifying OpenAI as a leading AI provider.

Yet the influx of capital came with mounting pressure to compete and monetise. OpenAI began behaving more like a Silicon Valley startup than a pure research outfit. It charged for API access, launched paid subscriptions, and curtailed its once-open research disclosures for “security and competitive” reasons. The tension between its nonprofit ideals and market ambitions grew harder to ignore.

The breaking point came in November 2023 with an extraordinary boardroom drama. OpenAI’s nonprofit board, tasked with ensuring the company stayed true to its mission, abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman, citing a “lack of consistent candour” in his communications.

The shock ouster of Altman, the charismatic figurehead of ChatGPT’s rise, sent the tech world into a tailspin, especially after it emerged that concerns about AI safety and OpenAI’s rapid pace might have been at issue.

Within five days, Altman was reinstated following an employee and investor uproar. Most of the board members who had ousted him resigned under pressure. The episode was a stark illustration of OpenAI’s governance quandary. The nonprofit oversight that reassured the public about OpenAI’s benevolent mission had become a wildcard factor in a company now valued like a $100 billion startup.

As Vox observed, the saga “made it clear that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit could potentially have huge implications,” particularly for Microsoft, which had billions at stake. After that turmoil, OpenAI’s leadership grew even more convinced that its existing structure was unsustainable.

Shift to a public-benefit corporation

In late 2023, OpenAI started mapping out a plan to overhaul its corporate structure. The centrepiece would be converting OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary into a new entity incorporated as a public benefit corporation (PBC). A PBC is a company that balances profit-making with a stated social mission.

Crucially, unlike the earlier capped-profit model, this change would remove the hard ceiling on investor returns, allowing venture backers to profit without limit. OpenAI’s nonprofit parent would likely either become a minority shareholder in the new PBC or receive a one-time payout. In other words, OpenAI was preparing to shed the very safeguards that once made it unique: the nonprofit’s veto power and the cap on profits, all in favour of a more typical corporate arrangement.

Developing advanced AI has become a capital-intensive arms race, with rivals like Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Elon Musk’s new startup xAI all vying for talent and computing resources. OpenAI’s leadership argues that staying ahead in AI requires access to far greater funding than a nonprofit model can provide. Under American law, nonprofits face strict limits on raising investment.

Neil Elan, a partner at a tech law firm, stated that “they can’t sell stock or offer returns.”

He explains that “equity is what drives a lot of these high-valuation models in Silicon Valley. Without the ability to issue lucrative shares, OpenAI feared it wouldn’t fully compete with Meta, Microsoft, and Google, which have access to a lot more resources… without comparable funding.”

Those worries crystallised as OpenAI negotiated a blockbuster financing deal earlier this year. In April 2025, OpenAI announced it had closed a record-setting $40 billion funding round led by Japan’s SoftBank. The deal pegged OpenAI’s valuation at an eye-popping $300 billion. The catch? Roughly 75% of that investment is contingent on OpenAI completing its structural revamp by the end of 2025.

The investment agreement allows SoftBank and other backers to withdraw up to $30 billion of the funding if OpenAI does not transition to the new PBC structure on schedule. The message was clear: to secure the full war chest needed for its aggressive AI roadmap, OpenAI had to cast off any structural quirks that made investors nervous.

And the investors were getting nervous. The November boardroom fracas had highlighted how OpenAI’s nonprofit oversight could unpredictably intervene in business decisions. This created a risk factor almost unheard of among tech unicorns.

According to a previously unreported letter from OpenAI’s lawyers to California regulators, “many potential investors in OpenAI’s recent funding rounds declined to invest due to its unusual governance structure.”

This contradicts earlier narratives that investors were lining up in droves.

Indeed, some of Silicon Valley’s biggest players baulked at OpenAI’s hybrid model after seeing Altman briefly dethroned by a nonprofit board. To calm the investor concerns, OpenAI’s leadership initiated plans soon after the Altman episode to remove nonprofit control and restructure as a profit-centric PBC. In effect, the startup’s meteoric success was forcing it to become more like a traditional corporation in order to keep raising capital at sky-high valuations.

Sam Altman himself has acknowledged that, in hindsight, OpenAI’s founders underestimated how costly and fast-moving the AI race would become.

He noted that if he could redo 2015, he might have structured OpenAI differently from the start. Other AI startups, Anthropic (founded by ex-OpenAI researchers) and xAI (founded by Musk), learnt from OpenAI’s example and launched as public benefit corporations from day one.

Now OpenAI is racing to catch up and give its backers the standard corporate framework and eventual stock market payday they expect. Investors are already eyeing a potential OpenAI IPO by 2027, which could turn early stakes by firms like Microsoft and SoftBank into massive profits.

The activist backlash

As OpenAI moved forward with its restructuring behind closed doors, Orson Aguilar and his allies mobilised a counteroffensive in public. Aguilar’s first call after digesting the news in October 2024 was to Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation.

Blackwell, a prominent figure in Bay Area philanthropy, immediately recognised echoes of a past fight. In the 1990s, he and other advocates had taken on a wave of nonprofit hospitals and insurers attempting to convert into for-profit companies.

As those healthcare nonprofits demutualised, some executives manoeuvred to boost payouts for themselves while hollowing out the charitable foundations that were meant to receive the nonprofits’ assets.

Consumer advocates in California, including Blackwell’s colleague Judith Bell, latched onto an obscure but powerful statute. Under state law, all the assets of a nonprofit are irrevocably dedicated to the public and belong to the people of the state forever, only to be used for charitable purposes.

The law grants California’s attorney general broad authority to approve or deny any conversion of a nonprofit’s assets and to ensure that the public is protected when a nonprofit becomes a private entity.

Bell and others built a coalition in the 1990s that pressured the California Attorney General to enforce those rules rigorously. The result was a series of agreements that preserved enormous charitable endowments even as hospitals transitioned into for-profit status.

In California alone, that activism helped create three of the state’s largest private foundations, including the $4 billion California Endowment, which was funded by assets spun out of former nonprofit hospitals.

Advocates estimate that they saved $15 billion in charitable funds from being diverted by businesses and their investors through those deals.

“You can protect the charitable assets and allow these companies to go forth in the for-profit world,” Bell says, reflecting on that chapter. In other words, compromise is possible. Companies can convert, but the public must get its fair share.

Seeing history repeat itself, Bell, Blackwell, and Aguilar decided to revive that old playbook. By late 2023, they had assembled a broad coalition of community and labour organisations. More than 50 groups, ranging from tech accountability nonprofits to unions like SEIU, expressed alarm at the idea of OpenAI’s charitable assets being diverted to private gain.

In January 2025, the coalition launched a public campaign and formally petitioned California Attorney General Rob Bonta to scrutinise OpenAI’s plans. Their request was direct: Do not approve this conversion without firm guarantees that OpenAI’s nonprofit assets (both tangible and intangible) will be fully valued and used for the public good going forward.

The coalition’s letter to Bonta, costeered by Aguilar, expressed doubt that OpenAI intended to comply with the spirit of the law. They accused OpenAI of skirting transparency and failing to detail how its nonprofit stake, which some estimate could be worth $20 to $30 billion given OpenAI’s valuation, would be protected.

Any scheme that values OpenAI’s nonprofit share at even a penny less than fair market value “would be unlawful,” Aguilar argues.

He adds that anything short of full independence for the nonprofit arm risks allowing commercial imperatives to override the charity’s purpose. In short, the activists want OpenAI’s nonprofit to remain firmly in control or receive a payout that reflects its foundational role in creating ChatGPT and other breakthroughs.

Ideally, they envision that endowment fuelling what could become one of the best-resourced nonprofits in history, a massive charitable foundation to fund AI for good, free from the influence of OpenAI’s new for-profit owners.

This grassroots pressure has already scored some symbolic wins. By March, as media coverage of the “OpenAI rebellion” intensified, the company’s leadership reached out to engage with the coalition. Aguilar, Blackwell, and others sat with OpenAI representatives in San Francisco for a tense meeting.

According to participants, OpenAI staff were eager to correct what they described as “misconceptions” about the restructuring and even asked for feedback on how the nonprofit’s mission might evolve in the future. But when Aguilar pressed for concrete answers on how much funding and independence the nonprofit would retain under the new plan, he says OpenAI’s emissaries deflected. Not long after, OpenAI announced it was creating a special advisory commission, a move widely seen as a response to the coalition’s campaign.

California’s attorney general enters the fray

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who oversees nonprofit charities in the state, became a pivotal figure in this unfolding drama. Triggered by the January petition, Bonta’s office quietly opened an investigation into OpenAI’s plans and requested financial records from the company earlier this year.

While such probes are typically confidential, Bonta’s spokesperson publicly confirmed in the spring that the California Department of Justice was actively reviewing OpenAI’s restructuring and remained in continued conversations with the company.

OpenAI must convince Bonta that its conversion plan will not improperly discard any charitable trust obligations. The attorney general has the authority to block the deal or to impose conditions if it fails to meet legal requirements.

At the centre of this scrutiny is a distinctly Californian legal safeguard. When a nonprofit organisation, like OpenAI Inc., houses valuable assets or subsidiaries, those assets are considered charitable in perpetuity. The law allows nonprofits to convert or sell assets, but only if the public interest is fairly served and the charitable value is preserved.

Any windfall generated from, for instance, turning OpenAI’s research into a public stock offering should primarily benefit nonprofit coffers earmarked for public benefit. What activists fear is a repeat of past abuses: insiders or investors structuring deals that shortchange the nonprofit, and by extension the public, out of the true value of what was built under the nonprofit’s umbrella.

Critics say OpenAI’s original restructuring plan appeared to do exactly that. Under the version circulated in late 2023, OpenAI’s nonprofit parent would sell its majority control in exchange for a stake in the new PBC and certain licensing rights. However, it would no longer directly own the core technology it had developed.

Observers noted that the nonprofit appeared to be transforming into just another investor, sacrificing governance for funding, which effectively diminished its public-interest role.

“Nonprofit control over how AGI is developed and governed is so important to OpenAI’s mission that removing control would violate the special fiduciary duty owed to the nonprofit’s beneficiaries,” argued a group of prominent tech experts and legal scholars in an open letter to Bonta.

According to that letter, “The nonprofit’s beneficiaries are all of us, the general public, and no amount of payout could compensate for the loss of a direct role in shaping the future of one of the world’s most powerful AI labs.”

This expert letter, published on a site pointedly titled “Not for Private Gain”, was signed in April by more than 30 prominent AI voices, including pioneering researcher Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, leading AI ethicists Margaret Mitchell and Stuart Russell, and even several former OpenAI insiders.

They called on Bonta and the Delaware attorney general (since OpenAI is incorporated in Delaware) to intervene and prevent any restructuring plan that removes public oversight of OpenAI’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) research. The letter warned that eliminating the nonprofit’s control would gut essential governance mechanisms that keep OpenAI’s profit motives in check.

Legal firestorm and public reckoning

Pressure was also mounting from unexpected directions. In early 2024, Elon Musk, who had co-founded OpenAI but left in 2018, filed a lawsuit to halt the restructuring. He claimed that OpenAI was abandoning the charitable mission for which he had originally donated funds. Musk further alleged that his $100 million donation had been improperly used to help establish the for-profit arm.

Surprisingly, some of OpenAI’s competitors voiced support for Musk’s challenge. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, publicly backed the effort to stall the transformation. While critics noted that both Musk and Meta had their own competitive reasons for opposing OpenAI’s rise, their involvement added to the scrutiny surrounding the company’s motives.

Musk’s legal action did not immediately block OpenAI’s plans. A federal judge in California declined to grant a preliminary injunction in the spring of 2025. However, the lawsuit added complexity and drew public attention. OpenAI responded by countersuing Musk, accusing him of trying to undermine a rival out of self-interest.

Critics emphasised the obvious: many of OpenAI’s financial backers were traditional venture capitalists seeking substantial returns, not long-term philanthropists. When OpenAI transitions fully into a profit-maximising enterprise, skeptics fear it will become beholden to shareholder interests.

The consequences of this transition could extend far beyond OpenAI itself. If the company completes its conversion with minimal nonprofit influence, it might establish a precedent for other tech ventures. Future startups could adopt nonprofit language and structures to attract donations and goodwill, only to switch to for-profit status once they reach commercial success. This possibility alarms nonprofit advocates, who warn that it could erode public trust in charitable innovation.

On the other hand, if regulators force significant concessions, such as creating a large, independent foundation or embedding real public-interest oversight, it could reaffirm the public’s rightful stake in high-impact technologies. That kind of intervention would send a powerful signal that phrases like “for the benefit of humanity” must be backed by accountability and tangible structures.

Ultimately, the key question concerns governance. Who will lead the development of the next generation of artificial intelligence? Will private investment prevail, or will public interest play a significant role? If OpenAI’s nonprofit organisation becomes a passive shareholder, there is a risk that the values of safety, equity, and long-term benefit may be overshadowed by a focus on quarterly earnings.

However, if California’s attorney general and other regulators take action, we could maintain democratic oversight over one of the most significant technologies of our time.

The post Can OpenAI’s idealism survive corporate change? appeared first on International Finance.

He slowly included phoney numbers into the financial report. Instead of five years of hard labour, he turned his firm into a winner in one hour. He clicked send to show his investors; surely, he would get caught.

But he did not. It pleased his backers that his business was growing. Without knowing the data were manufactured, they contributed extra money to help Gibran avoid bankruptcy. In late 2018, he began building a house of cards that would cost some of the world’s greatest money managers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Six years after starting a second set of accounts (a real one for his team and a second, inflated book for investors), eFishery was one of Asia’s brightest firms with $1.4 billion in valuation and 2,000 employees. In addition to automated fish feeders to enhance output, it offered financing.

By the time it fell, the fraud had spread worldwide with bogus shell firms and inflated accounts. According to an internal enquiry, the corporation reported $752 million in first-nine-month 2024 revenues but actually earned $157 million.

Deception caught several of the world’s most prominent venture capitalists, including SoftBank Group Corp. and Temasek Holdings. Abu Dhabi’s 42XFund and Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital to Sequoia India and Southeast Asia (now Peak XV).

The episode raises unpleasant concerns about ego, groupthink, and how so many red flags were missed in backing a business darling. At least $300 million was lost by investors. It is unclear how much each fund lost, and some may have sold shares at a greater valuation.

The beginning

Gibran was reared in East Jakarta’s slums by a construction worker father and a homemaker mother. MIT of Indonesia, Institut Teknologi Bandung, was his biology school. When his family struggled financially, Gibran was on his own. As food was scarce, he slept in mosques and at school, tutoring for money, working in a convenience store, and various side jobs.

Inspired, he rented ponds after taking a fish-farming course. He rapidly discovered hard work, small margins, and finicky fish.

Aquaculture, or water agriculture, is hard. Too little feed starves fish, while too much wastes money and produces algae. Spawned eggs are nursed in a series of pools before being released into larger ponds and given precise amounts at specific intervals. After months of care, fish must be sold and transported, sometimes alive, to processors and customers. Prices can vary greatly.

Gibran was determined. To make more money, he opened warungs to sell cooked fish and urged grocery stores to carry his product. While managing over 70 ponds, he intended to start a seafood restaurant franchise.

One veteran farmer advised him that growth makes feeding a chore. Gibran welded and programmed an automated fish feeder himself. His student project was a shiny milk bucket connected to a funnel that gravity-fed fish meal pellets onto a rotating disk. Texting opened a slide to release the feed, which scattered across the water.

Using a prototype on his motorcycle, he travelled between farms on rutted roads and village pathways for months. As the initially reluctant farmers observed yield benefits and provided testimonials, the initiative gained traction.

To raise awareness and win cash prizes to keep the business alive, he entered Jakarta startup competitions and quickly learnt the ABCs of venture capital: how to write a pitch deck, present his business model, and thrill investors with vision and financials.

eFishery struggled with their feeders’ expensive pricing and small-scale fish farming’s tight margins. Costs range from $400 to $600, depending on size and incentives. That was too expensive for many Indonesian clients, where 10% of the 280 million people live below the poverty line, and labour is inexpensive.

Gibran immediately switched from selling to renting his machines to farmers. He thought he could launch his feeders faster and recoup their expenditures in a few years. Because he had to buy the equipment ahead, he was spending money.

He tried to attract regional venture funders but was turned down. Singapore regulatory documents show the startup had $8,142 in cash by December 2017.

Aqua-Spark remained interested. It offered $1.5 million in three equal tranches for the Series A round in May 2018. Only other investors could provide the final $500,000.

The bargain bought him time, but no one else joined. Gibran believed he was responsible for the first million dollars if he failed to get investors. Aqua-Spark co-founder Amy Novogratz stated that the agreement did not impose personal liability.

He asked fellow Indonesian founders how they raised new investments, dejected. Gibran believed the unclear, coded advice meant fudging the figures. He had a moral dilemma: be honest and fail, or manipulate the stats and keep the show going for himself, staff, and farmers.

The trolley speeds up

The sentiment changed drastically after a successful Series A fundraising, attracting Singapore-based Wavemaker Partners and San Francisco-based 500 Global’s Southeast Asia fund. It raised $4 million, including Aqua-Spark’s third tranche.

Gibran had to justify the spreadsheet’s new numbers. He started with a simple system. He said fish farmers had already bought feed and sold fish, so he offered 2% to 3% to “move” their business onto eFishery.

It was a sophisticated trick. Field consumers were unaffected. They used the same systems to sell to the same customers at the same prices. However, eFishery’s income increased after those transactions were added to its financial accounts.

Kabayan, a finance scheme that used the startup’s aquaculture expertise to assess harvesters’ credit scores and secure loans from lending platforms, was riskier. A 1% to 3% commission and little risk were promised by eFishery. The truth was worse: eFishery owed the debts, and default rates were high.

eFishery’s Singapore-filed financial filings indicate a 50-fold increase in sales from $185,405 in 2018 to $10 million in 2019. Investors were thrilled. In the same period, it went from a loss to a gross profit, attracting term sheets inconceivable months earlier. With greater money came rapid expansion: applications to buy fish directly from farmers and drop points across islands to distribute feed and collect fish.

It affected some farmers. In Cirebon, West Java, Suganda was one of the first to use the eFeeder machine. A chest-high plastic drum can carry 100 kg (220 lbs) of fish feed. The barrel’s bottom control box decides how much feed the pond fish receive. Farmers downloaded an eFishery app and entered feeding times and feed amounts to utilise the machine. Suganda denied that Gibran asked him to inflate numbers.

Suganda and his Cirebon collective farmers grew with $150,000 in loans from eFishery. His revenue increased by 20% to $603 a month as his pond count went from 10 to 70.

This progress occurred as startup investors sought more help-the-world concepts. Morningstar reported that sustainable fund assets rose 67% to roughly $1.7 trillion in 2020 as investors sought social and environmental partnerships.

With Gibran’s rags-to-riches story and increasing financials, eFishery was a rising star. Gibran raised $20 million in Series B funding in 2020 from private equity firm Northstar Group and Go-Ventures (formerly Argor Capital).

Money and pride

Gibran said eFishery did not need extra money now. The pandemic even helped him balance the books: investors expected revenues to drop, but the business was doing well. He fabricated slow growth to catch up with the genuine data.

He learnt that SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son wanted to talk. In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic peaked. He could not show SoftBank the fish farms in Indonesia that used his product like he did with prior investors. He only had an hour.

Gibran was anxious at his Bandung office. He bred fish on a small Indonesian farm a few years ago, and now SoftBank, which had raised roughly $100 billion for startup deals through its “Vision Fund,” was ready to verify his conviction in eFishery’s future.

The company provided support to Yahoo Japan, Alibaba Group Holding, and Grab Holdings, which is one of Southeast Asia’s most promising companies. Gibran mentioned that Son, who was listening from Tokyo, interrupted the pitch after 15 minutes. One of SoftBank’s term sheets valued the company at $200 million, which made Gibran very happy.

Sequoia India and Southeast Asia (Peak XV) suddenly submitted a $300 million bid. Temasek, Singapore’s multibillion-dollar state-owned investor, also sought allocations. Gibran opened WhatsApp and saw a text from Temasek CEO Dilhan Pillay, which he thought was spam. Pillay requested time to discuss.

He enjoyed the attention his small startup was getting, but he spent nights worrying about its weak foundations. eFishery reported 1.6 trillion rupiah ($95.3 million) in revenue and 142 billion rupiah before-tax profit in 2021. Revenue fell 40% to 958 billion rupiah, with a pre-tax loss of 164 billion rupiah.

Gibran felt uneasy with the lie, but he remembered the trolley problem. He noticed how eFishery helped certain farmers. His startup had an impact, he believed. Taking this money would put further pressure on eFishery to grow, thus reconciling its two books would have to wait. He was split.

After the interest, SoftBank, Temasek, and Sequoia India offered $90 million in new funding at a $410 million value, according to Gibran, sources, and Alternatives.pe. The price was high for a young firm led by an unskilled Indonesian fish salesperson. Three years ago, eFishery was worth $12 million, but the world’s greatest investors noticed. The deal was accepted.

Red flags missed

In retrospect, warning indicators existed. The 2020 Singapore holding company financial statement was filed in 2024. The lack of disruption in markets where eFishery claimed to be making waves was noteworthy. The company purportedly had over 300,000 feeding units in the field and over 44,000 fish and shrimp farmers buying from its platform by 2023, which should have shaken the supply chain.

Gibran ghosted them when one investor with feed producer ties tried to connect them with eFishery, a win-win for both parties. Another said Gibran was typically three months late with basic numbers and that a feeder component manufacturer told them it only produced enough for 5,000 units per year. Senior officials at Indonesia’s largest fish feed distributors informed a separate investor that their unchanging sales were confusing.

Gibran said he needed larger farms with over $1 million in annual sales for his inflation approach to make sense after his Series C funding round, because the claims and targets were so big. After searching the nation, he found nothing to join.

He states that an employee proposed a solution in early 2022. By establishing a complex network of subsidiaries and managing farmers’ accounts, the firm became sophisticated enough to exaggerate transactions. He notes that this led to the creation of five enterprises with over 5,000 accounts related to fish feed and fish sales.

While trying to meet investor claims, he burned through actual money. The lax checks and collections on the lending site made it popular with fish farmers, but default rates rose. The software had major troubles, requiring nationwide field teams and sales matchers.

By then, phoney numbers made eFishery seem supercharged. Series D fundraising spearheaded by Abu Dhabi-based sovereign fund 42X raised $200 million at a $1.4 billion value. The investors included Malaysian pension fund KWAP.

During all these raisings, eFishery was reviewed by top investors and auditors. Three sources said Grant Thornton audited the Indonesian entity’s 2022 annual financial statements while PwC was a week away from signing off.

Grant Thornton is investigating the eFishery claims and is concerned about them. Gibran said 20 farmers were visited for Series B fundraising and 70 for Series C. He said the due diligence firms used eFishery’s database of farms to tell the startup which they planned to visit, aside from a few random spot inspections.

This allowed Gibran to prepare the ground. Gibran adds that local area managers were handed fact sheets with numbers to tell visitors and informed farmers; the rest was luck.

The same issues that make Indonesia a difficult market can make auditing corporations difficult. The nation has over 17,000 islands, and much of the job is done in rural areas where exact addresses are not enough, and farmers need to reach the front door.

The fall

Gibran planned to fix the business after investors were told it was stopping expansion to focus on financial sustainability before going public. Make eFishery Great Again was his Project MEGA.

To improve its financial health, eFishery aimed to more than halve its losses before tax to 107 billion rupiah, cut late loans on its Kabayan programme, and persuade more farmers to use its technology. It also wanted additional farmers to buy and sell fish through them. They had a challenge: half of their 28,000 Kabayan fish and shrimp growers were idle. Documents showed another 7,000 frozen accounts. Over 90% of eFishery’s sales came from firms with less than 2% gross profit margin.

Gibran revealed in a 30-minute Zoom chat on December 11 that he confessed to Aqua-Spark co-founder and eFishery board member Novogratz, who was one of the company’s original investors and his mentor. Gibran stated that Novogratz was deeply disappointed in him.

Two days later, on December 13, eFishery’s Steering Committee suspended Gibran. An interim CEO and CFO took control of eFishery, including its bank accounts.

Many lessons learnt

Investors are contemplating how to close the company. The board hired FTI Consulting Singapore to evaluate and manage the organisation. It advised closing the business and returning investors’ money. Abu Dhabi’s 42X, which spent $100 million in April 2023, may receive $8.3 million two years later.

A mystery is what happened to all the money. The FTI research suggests that some staff stole money, and Gibran received a salary and bonus comparable to a much larger company, but he seemed to live modestly. One worker drove a Hyundai Ioniq 5 to work. Indonesian tycoons have fled with millions of investment dollars, while he stays in Bandung, a second-tier city where he founded the firm to cut costs. None of his critics have proven he embezzled.

According to Winnie Yamashita Rolindrawan, partner at Indonesian law firm SSEK, the scandal exposed vulnerabilities in regulatory oversight and corporate governance in Indonesia.

While Rolindrawan advocated for VCs adopting a more thorough due diligence approach, on their part, startups must maintain accurate and verifiable records. Investors need to closely monitor, apart from carrying out post-funding audits, to ensure that startups operate transparently.

The post The rise & fall of eFishery appeared first on International Finance.

Sam Altman, who earlier stated that he would continue to serve as the company’s CEO, will continue to supervise all three verticals. According to a Bloomberg report, Simo will report directly to Altman, while Brad Lightcap, Sarah Friar, and Kevin Weil, the chief operating officer (COO), chief financial officer (CFO), and chief product officer (CPO) of OpenAI, will report to her.

“Joining OpenAI at this critical moment is an incredible privilege and responsibility. This organisation has the potential to accelerate human potential at a pace never seen before and I am deeply committed to shaping these applications toward the public good,” Simo said, while also clarifying that she will continue to serve as chair of the Instacart board.

Fidji Simo’s move to OpenAI was announced just days after the ChatGPT maker revealed it was scrapping its controversial plan to become a for-profit company. As part of OpenAI’s latest governance plan, the nonprofit parent will retain control over the public benefit corporation and become a major shareholder in it.

“Applications bring together a group of existing business and operational teams responsible for how our research reaches and benefits the world, and Fidji is uniquely qualified to lead this group,” Sam Altman wrote in a blog post, adding that Simo has already contributed a great deal to the company since joining OpenAI’s board in 2024. She also sits on the board of Shopify.

Early Life And Career Of Fidji Simo

French-American businesswoman Fidji Simo was born in Sète, France, on October 5, 1985. She is well-known for her significant leadership in the technology sector. She was the first person in her family to graduate from high school and went on to obtain a Master’s degree from HEC Paris after finishing her last year at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. She was raised in a fishing family. Her remarkable career trajectory has been shaped by the strong work ethic and collaborative leadership style that her modest upbringing instilled.

Fidji Simo joined Facebook in 2011 after starting her career at eBay, where she worked on local commerce projects. Overseeing essential features like News Feed, Stories, Marketplace, and Facebook Live, she advanced to become the head of Facebook’s flagship app. Scaling Facebook’s mobile advertising business was made possible in large part by her leadership. In 2021, she was named CEO of Instacart, where she chaired the board and led the business through a successful initial public offering in 2023. She joined OpenAI in May 2025 as CEO of Applications, managing operations, finance, and products while freeing up CEO Sam Altman to concentrate on strategy and research.

When Simo took over the reins as CEO, Instacart was facing intense competition from the likes of Amazon, Walmart, and DoorDash. However, she successfully steered the company back to growth amid the COVID-19 pandemic. She was the key brain behind the company transforming itself from a delivery service provider to a retail tech giant with a profitable advertising business as well. Under Simo’s leadership, Instacart’s self-serve advertising platform also generated nearly USD 1 billion in annual revenue in 2024.

Fidji Simo also oversaw the launches of Carrot Ads and Carrot Insights as part of a broader retail media strategy that reportedly led to Instacart being used by over 220 retailer banners and more than 7,000 Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands, according to a report by Forbes. In January 2024, Instacart started showing customers personalised ads on its AI-powered smart shopping carts in physical stores.

As Instacart became a publicly traded company in 2023 with its IPO, it raised over USD 660 million at a valuation of USD 10 billion. Simo staged Instacart’s financial turnaround as she implemented measures like freezing headcount and renegotiating cloud contracts. As for Instacart’s AI strategy, Simo announced the launch of Smart Shop in March 2025. Smart Shop will now offer a personalised shopping experience for customers by leveraging AI and machine learning to understand their shopping habits and identify patterns in their dietary preferences.

In addition to her business positions, Fidji Simo is involved in advocacy and healthcare. She is the president of the Metrodora Institute’s foundation and a co-founder of the research and treatment facility for complicated neuroimmune diseases. The non-profit organisation Women in Product, which supports women in tech leadership, was also co-founded by her. Simo has been honoured for her leadership by Fortune, Fast Company, and Vanity Fair. She is a member of the boards of OpenAI and Shopify. Along with her spouse, Remy Miralles, and their daughter, she resides in San Francisco.

A Timely Appointment

Conversational shopping assistants and advertising tools are expected to be the next phase of AI development. Based on Simo’s past experience in retail media and advertising, she appears to be the perfect choice to build and expand OpenAI’s offerings in this space.

ChatGPT’s search functionality recently got upgraded to provide an improved and personalised online shopping experience for users. Now, users who look for products online using the Search feature in ChatGPT will see images of products as well as details such as pricing and reviews. The AI-generated search results will also include direct links to websites where they can buy those products. Fidji Simo is expected to further enhance this particular search functionality. She also brings monetisation expertise to the table as OpenAI looks to balance its hyper-growth with rising compute costs.

The ChatGPT maker will also restructure itself in a format that will allow its non-profit entity to retain ultimate control, a plan that has received the blessing of Japanese giant SoftBank, one of the AI startup’s biggest backers. The endorsement of SoftBank became crucial as the Japanese firm’s $30 billion investment in OpenAI was contingent on a change in structure. In March 2025, OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round, receiving $30 billion from SoftBank. OpenAI needs to conclude the restructuring process by December 31, failing which SoftBank’s portion of the financing will be reduced to USD 20 billion.

Instead of fully turning into a for-profit entity, OpenAI’s non-profit arm will retain control of the company, while the limited liability company, which handles all of the business operations, will turn into a public benefit corporation. That means this division will have the ability to generate profit, but will also focus on social good.

Image Credits: Instacart

The post Business Leader of the Week: OpenAI taps retail tech star Fidji Simo appeared first on International Finance.

Jack Ma used these constant rejections to forge a stronger foundation for Alibaba Group Holding, which he co-founded in 1999. Additionally, it gave him the desire to think strategically and unconventionally, enabling him to transform Alibaba into a Chinese tech conglomerate with a market capitalization of $284.35 billion as of January 2023.

Market observers were not surprised by Jack Ma’s announcement that he would relinquish control of Ant Group, a unit of Alibaba. This action will appease Chinese authorities, who have been increasing their pressure on the corporation to reorganize its intricate organizational structure as per the requirements of the People’s Bank of China.

The business claimed it was changing its ownership structure to guarantee that “no shareholder, alone or jointly with other parties, will have control over Ant Group.” To “further enhance the stability of our corporate structure and sustainability of our long-term development,” the statement stated Jack Ma will now only control 6.2% of the voting rights.

After dealing with opposition from Chinese regulatory officials for over two years, the billionaire had debated separating the fintech from Alibaba for some time.

The situation reached a breaking point in November 2022 when officials abruptly stopped Ant Group’s first public offering (IPO), valued at over $200 billion. This was put on hold after China’s financial watchdogs cracked down on Chinese stocks listed on US exchanges.

So how did China’s most well-known and flamboyant corporate icon lose favour and end up on the government’s bad books?

A tale of rags to riches
Jack Ma, born in 1964 in Zhejiang, China, was an inquisitive child from an early age. However, when he was a teenager and eager to study English, he worked as a tour guide for foreign tourists to improve his command of the language since he believed this was a more effective method than memorizing words from a book.

Later, he attempted to enrol at Hangzhou Teachers College by taking the entrance exam but failed twice. However, Jack Ma didn’t give up, and in 1984 he was accepted into the college. He received his English degree four years later, and from then, he taught English at Hangzhou Dianzi University until 1993.

It is nearly impossible to hold a self-starter down for an extended time. So by starting Haibo Translation Agency in 1994, Jack Ma used his English proficiency to offer translation and interpreting services.

A year later, while on an official trip to the US on behalf of the city of Hangzhou, he observed Americans using the internet to fulfil most of their demands, including communication, shopping, informational needs, and entertainment.

Jack Ma came home and established China Pages in 1995, an online directory for local businesses looking for international clients, after being astounded by how technology could change lives, livelihoods, lifestyles, and the economy. Many referred to it as China’s first indigenous Internet start-up. He, however, departed it after only two years and went on to lead a government-backed Internet business until 1999.

He created Alibaba Group Holding in 1999 as a B2B website to aid in transactions between small firms when the impulse to go it alone won out. Jack Ma upset Applecart business by charging users a small cost to become verified as trustworthy vendors on the network and an additional fee for selling to consumers overseas.

When he once visited a bank, the employees refused to process an online transaction because they claimed it was a financial product. This caused the former teacher to become a technocrat, and he subsequently stated in a lecture, “If a Chinese company didn’t go into payments, some overseas company would come to do it, and we’d end up the victims. So I went to hear Clinton speak about the importance of leadership when I was at Davos. That meant doing something brave that you believe in, which won’t harm your country or your consumers. Then I had my realization, and decided to give it my all.”

As a result, Alipay began operating as a third party in online transactions in 2003. With 1.3 billion users as of 2013, it had eclipsed Paypal’s 377 million users to take the top spot among mobile payment platforms worldwide, ahead of Apple Pay’s 507 million users and Google Pay’s 421 million.

Contrary to trend
Jack Ma focused on the 2003-launched consumer-focused platform Taobao after seeing the success of Alibaba’s B2B website. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) broke out in China that year, almost decimating the nation’s economy, as the government had to put lockdown to stop the spread of the disease.

His never-say-die attitude showed itself once more. Despite challenges faced by China, he and a core group of techies launched the site after finishing its development at his apartment. This decision turned the company’s fortunes around.

As more Chinese people shifted to online purchasing due to the self-imposed quarantine, Taobao established a solid foothold in the e-commerce industry. By 2006, it had surpassed eBay as the most popular e-commerce site in the nation, and by 2020, it was generating $56 billion in yearly revenue from over 600 million members.

Investors stream in
The expansion of Alibaba was not unnoticed. The year 2005 saw Yahoo investing $1 billion in the business, acquiring a 40% interest, while Softbank acquired another 30% interest. This gave the two firms a place at the table of the internet behemoth that was now well-known throughout China. Jack Ma had finally made it to the big leagues, thanks to this coalition, earning him the title of “China’s New Internet King” in the New York Times.

With the help of these favourable conditions, the e-commerce business raised $1.5 billion when it went public in 2007 on the Hong Kong stock exchange. However, the Chinese central bank published new third-party Internet payment provider regulations in 2010. It stated that these entities needed to apply for and obtain licenses from the People’s Bank of China to continue operating.

Jack Ma kept a 46% share in the financial services company and split off Alipay into a separate company. This led to a protracted dispute with Yahoo, which asserted that his decision to divide the company without informing it beforehand resulted in a sharp decline in the value of Yahoo’s stock.

Despite these developments, visionary entrepreneur-backed Alibaba applied for a $25 billion IPO in the US in 2014. However, there needed to be more clarity regarding the connection between Alibaba and Alipay, and concerns surfaced on how the parent firm would profit from the public offering.

Later, the Chinese conglomerate clarified in its revised draft prospectus that Alibaba no longer had “an ownership interest in or control over Alipay or its current parent company.” In addition, it acknowledged that Jack Ma still owned 46% of Small and Micro Financial Services firm (SMFSC), the parent firm of Alipay.

The Ant continues to march
Jack Ma gained recognition over time as the person who built a tech behemoth and the best brand representative for contemporary China. From former German Chancellor Angela Merkel to twice-elected American President Barack Obama, he embodied the nation’s significant technological advancements and economic prosperity.

The administration at home, though, was keeping a close eye on his expanding political views. Jack Ma attended the Bund Summit in October 2020, and things started going awry for him. In his address, he attacked the Chinese regulatory market, saying, “Good innovation is not afraid of regulation, but is afraid of being subjected to yesterday’s way to regulate.”

The Chinese billionaire may have been attempting to be humorous when he compared the nation to a “pawn market” and accused it of adhering to outdated business practices. But the dictatorial government was anything but amused.

Jack Ma’s comments were an outright rebuke of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s determination to end monopolistic activities to “prevent the disorderly expansion of capital.”

In retaliation, the Chinese antitrust authorities investigated Alibaba’s practice of pressuring vendors to sell exclusively through its platform. Ant Group representatives were called in for a meeting to discuss consumer rights and competition. Additionally, Alibaba found itself in the crossfire of the ongoing geopolitical verbal battle between China and the US, which has been more heated after COVID’s breakout, as US officials began closely scrutinizing Chinese businesses’ listings on their bourses.

To reach investors in mainland China for Ant Group’s initial public offering (IPO), the e-commerce giant said it would add a primary listing in Hong Kong to its New York presence. This came after the e-commerce behemoth paid a massive $2.8 billion fine due to regulatory scrutiny in China.

Jack Ma stayed out of the spotlight after the reaction from the administration and disappeared for a while. Then, according to Reuters, the Chinese financial authorities cautiously approved Ant Group’s request to resume its dual public listing in July 2022.

The man, the prophet
Jack Ma continues to be a visionary in the business realm, and players in the industry and politicians hold him in high regard despite his blunders in the political sphere.

He talked more about wanting to do more than manage a business as he met more fellow thinkers from diverse streams. He had a strong love for philanthropy and innovation, focusing on education in rural China as a nod to his earlier career as a teacher.

“In the future, there will be a competition for creativity, imagination, learning, and independent thought rather than for information. If you think like a machine, trouble will eventually arise,” Jack Ma said.

He also stated in one of his talks that after 20 years of making people more like machines, robots will resemble people in the next 20 years.

Jack Ma formally resigned from his position as Alibaba’s executive chairman in 2019. In an open statement announcing his departure, he said, “I still have many goals to pursue. Those who know me well understand that I dislike being idle. As I am still young and the world is vast, I want to experience new things.”

His decision to relinquish control of Ant Group is just another step in his departure from the vast empire he has created, leaving behind a lasting legacy.

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Bill Ackman, whose hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management is responsible for managing assets worth about USD 16 billion, slammed the Joe Biden government’s response while predicting an “economic disaster” to occur.

The United States Federal Reserve has stressed that no government funds would be required to compensate for the losses because the body is funded by its financial operations when it announced that everyone who had money in Silicon Valley Bank would receive their money back.

According to the Daily Mail, Bill Ackman, who had urged the American government to intervene and protect all of the bank’s depositors, applauded the action but cautioned that it was unlikely to stop the collapse of more financial institutions.

He wrote on Twitter, “We would have had a 1930s bank run continuing first thing Monday, causing substantial economic damage and hardship to millions, had the @FDICgov @USTreasury and @federalreserve not interfered today.”

He also said, “We now have a clear plan for how the government will manage them”, adding that “more banks will probably fail despite the involvement.”

According to US regulators, customers of the defunct bank will have access to all of their deposits beginning on Monday morning, even those that are greater than the USD 250,000 federally guaranteed cap.

“Our government made the right choice. In no way was this a bailout. The blame will fall on those who made a mistake. The bondholders will have a similar fate as the investors who failed to supervise their banks properly,” Bill Ackman said.

Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse might increase trouble for other US lenders, and even bring SoftBank Group’s investments under heightened scrutiny from the regulators, reported Bloomberg.

Silicon Valley Bank’s failure has reportedly raised concerns among investors over the exposure to start-up firms in the SoftBank Vision Funds. SoftBank shares plunged by 13% in four sessions to below 5,000 yen. The whole crisis has been dubbed the worst one since the 2008-09 banking rout, and has brought the spotlight to private tech investments.

Image Credits: Pershing Square Foundation

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Other investors besides SoftBank that also participated in the funding round for JusPay include VEF and Wellington Management. The firm processes around 10 million transactions a day, with a gross value of over $5 billion a month. According to the firm, it is looking towards getting at 100 million transactions per day.

Vimal Kumar, the founder and CEO of Juspay told the media, “Juspay has been in the forefront, building foundational infrastructure by unifying and enhancing hundreds of diverse payment options in a neutral way. We believe in ecosystem innovations like UPI and OCEN (Open Credit Enablement Network) and have built a deep value-driven culture to support such initiatives. This funding will help us scale up our mission in India and expand globally.”

Founded in 2012, JusPay has helped improve the user experience for billions of payment transactions for leading merchants like e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart.

Over the years, SoftBank has emerged as one of the largest foreign investors in India. So far, it has backed over a dozen startups with substantial funding. Recently, SoftBank also concluded its 15th deal in 2021 in the country as it bought a minority stake in Snapdeal-owned Unicommerce.

Unicommerce provides e-commerce enablement software for multichannel selling, inventory and warehouse management. According to reports, SoftBank has bought around 25-30 percent of the company.

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SoftBank said in a statement that Fund II will explore options to raise additional capital. The company launched the initial fund in 2019, which was called Innovation Fund with an initial $2 billion in committed capital, however, later the name was changed to Latin America Fund.

So far, SoftBank has invested in companies in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Argentina. It has invested in startups such as QuintoAndar, Rappi, Mercado Bitcoin, Gympass and MadeiraMadeira.

Recently, SoftBank announced that it has added two new managing partners to its LatAm Fund team. Both Rodrigo Baer and Marco Camhaji will focus on identifying and supporting early-stage companies across the region, media reports said.

In a statement, SoftBank Chairman and chief executive Masayoshi Son said, “SoftBank will continue to drive technology adoption that will benefit hundreds of millions of people in this part of the world.”

“There is so much innovation and disruption taking place in Latin America, and I believe the business opportunities there have never been stronger. Latin America is a critical part of our strategy – this is why we are expanding our presence and doubling down on our commitment with Marcelo at the helm.”

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The company was set to launch in the UK as it secured licences to operate in Manchester, Salford and Sheffield.

A Didi spokesperson told the media, “We continue to explore additional new markets, liaising with relevant stakeholders in each and being thoughtful about when to introduce our services. As soon as we have news on additional new markets, we look forward to sharing it.”

In July, China’s cyberspace regulator recently ordered the app stores to ban ride-hailing firm Didi Global after the application has severely violated relevant laws and regulations while collecting and abusing user data.

The regulator also told the ride-hailing company to take strict measures to fix the loopholes which are in accordance with the law and national standards which will ensure the data safety of users.

Earlier this year, the company revealed a loss of $1.6 billion for 2020 in its latest IPO filing. While filing a prospectus for its upcoming blockbuster US IPO, the company revealed that they have incurred heavy losses in recent years but now there is a solid chance of getting closer to profitability.

Last year, the company raised a funding of $62 billion, according to media reports. Didi’s largest shareholders include SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Uber Technologies, and Tencent Holdings.

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