OpenAI’s CFO says it trusts Elon Musk to ‘compete appropriately’ after his ally David Sacks was appointed AI czar

Sarah Friar was appointed as OpenAI’s chief financial officer in June.

OpenAI trusts Elon Musk to act in good faith as the owner of a rival AI company with the ear of President-elect Donald Trump, its CFO said.

“We trust him…as a competitor, [Musk] will put first the national interest and compete appropriately,” Sarah Friar, the CFO of OpenAI, said at the Reuters NEXT conference on Tuesday.

Musk is a close Trump advisor and is co-leading the advisory body DOGE alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk’s ally and fellow PayPal Mafia member David Sacks was recently appointed as Trump’s AI and crypto czar.

After Sacks was tapped for the position, OpenAI chief Sam Altman — with whom Musk has a long-running feud — took to X to congratulate him on the role. Musk responded with a laughing emoji.

Friar’s comments follow Altman’s remarks at The New York Times’ DealBook summit last week, in which he said he didn’t think Musk would use his political power to his advantage and boost his own AI startup, xAI.

He said, “I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon would hurt competitors and advantage his own businesses.”

Musk has been embroiled in a legal battle with OpenAI since March after twice suing the company behind ChatGPT. He accused the company and some of its cofounders of violating its founding charter with its plans to change its corporate structure to become a for-profit business, and of putting commercial interests ahead of its original mission to benefit humanity.

Altman also addressed the feud between him and Musk at the DealBook conference, calling it “tremendously sad” and said he grew up looking to Musk as a “mega hero.”

xAI was launched just 16 months ago, but it has quickly scaled up to be considered a competitor of OpenAI. In record time, the $50 billion startup built a supercomputer in Memphis that has 100,00 GPUs and is aiming to increase that to at least one million.

OpenAI and Elon Musk didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from B-17, made outside normal working hours.