The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

How to Turn a Partner's Asset Into Your Competitive Weapon

The fastest way to build a moat is to make someone else's resources do the work — before your rivals think to ask.

Just spoke to Satya and talked about OpenAI needing one the order of 10,000 servers with the latest Nvidia GPUs to beat the best human players at competitive eSports games. This would obviously be a major opportunity for Microsoft to promote Azure relative to other cloud systems. He said he'd talk internally and get back to me soon. Please send me the ideal spec for the individual servers and how they are connected. What ideally do we want Microsoft to do? Sounds like there is a good chance they will do it.

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Court Exhibit
Musk v. Altman (OpenAI)
4:24-cv-04722 (CAND), Doc. 353-15, filed 2025-11-07
June 28, 2017
Public domain
View the primary source →