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Executive women platform Chief opened a new clubhouse in San Francisco this week.

Chief

In a bustling building in New York’s Flatiron district, two executive women who work at separate companies discuss marketing strategies for their respective businesses. Next to them, three retired women in their sixties share a champagne toast. Across the room, several other women, sitting at single wooden tables, have their heads down at their laptops. Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman” plays in the background.

“I’m in the middle of a career transition,” says one woman to another she just met at the nearby bar. She says she works for Cushman & Wakefield but plans to change careers from her job in human resources.

“I’ve done big companies for far too long and I think it’s time to move on to something smaller,” she continued. “Covid did us all in,” the other woman said, agreeably nodding.

It may sound like a typical professional networking environment but one thing about this building is different: there’s not a single man in sight.

‘Sense that this is a first’

On the opposite coast, a counterpart executive clubhouse just opened in San Francisco and it holds great meaning beyond its four walls.

Start-up Chief launched an exclusive networking platform for executive women in 2019 and saw a surge in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic. It subsequently opened physical clubhouse spaces in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Men are allowed in but members are exclusively executive women.

Earlier this year, Chief received a $100 million Series B investment led by Alphabet venture arm CapitalG with plans to use the money to open a new club where founders say they were getting the biggest demand: The San Francisco Bay Area.

Chief’s San Francisco clubhouse includes a full-service bar.

The recently-opened clubhouse is located adjacent to the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco’s financial district. Silicon Valley had the highest demand from members, said founders Lindsay Kaplan and Carolyn Childers. The region is home to 2,000 local members working for Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Zoom and Stanford among others.

The 8,600 square-foot space features a full-service bar with specialty coffee, open lounge space, meeting rooms, private call booths and a Mothers Room. All the artwork in Chief’s clubhouses comes from the women-led company Uprise Art, founded by member Tze Chun.

Over 300 members attended the launch event at the San Francisco clubhouse. Members flew in for the clubhouse opening night in late October. Some arrived straight from the airport. “So exciting!” one woman rolling a suitcase said as she greeted Childers and Kaplan with hugs. “I’ve f—–g earned this,” Kaplan recalled another saying.

Susan Cevallos Coleman, a global vice president at GoPro attended the opening night. “I just looked around and had a moment,” Coleman said.

“You have the profound sense that this is a first,” said Attica Jaques, Global Head of Brand Marketing at Google who also attended the opening night.

‘Full Circle’

A month after the San Francisco Chief club’s opening, women say they already see it as a milestone moment that represents more than just a new building.

Silicon Valley has historically had the highest density of homogeneous demographics that favored white men in executive ranks. It’s also historically been unfriendly to women as exclusionary “boys clubs” long overtook the world’s tech epicenter. Unlike other nearby clubhouses like the Battery, Chief’s new clubhouse is a place designed just for them.

“I know deeply the feeling of the tech industry led by white men,” Jaques said. “It’s interesting coming full-circle and it feels long overdue.”

Executive women platform Chief opened a new clubhouse in San Francisco this week.

Chief

Jaques, a San Francisco native who moved back to San Francisco from New York in 2019, said “we tend to always feel like we have to pull up a seat at the table if it’s not there, so we’ve built a muscle around it.”

Coleman added: “The women who have somehow, some way made it to where we are now, can now influence the younger women who may be hesitant to dip their toes in the lake because what they read is it may not be a friendly place for them.”

“But when I walk into the Chief space, that premise that tech is exclusionary no longer feels true,” she said.

Coleman, who’s spent her career working in tech auditing in Silicon Valley since the early 2000s at Sun Microsystems, said she’s looking forward to using the space as a central meeting place for her core group of Chief members dispersed across the Bay Area. Jaques said she’s looking forward to networking happy hours and programming speakers. The platform hosted a virtual event with speaker Melinda French Gates in early November when around 2,000 Chief members tuned in.

“This is the physical manifestation of what I’ve been benefitting from,” Coleman said after the opening. “I saw so many amazing women, including one I worked with three companies ago.”

The Covid-19 pandemic bolstered Chief’s business as women flocked to Chief’s platform, which served as a support system during a time of solitude, members said. More than 20,000 senior executives have signed on from over 8,500 companies including HBO, American Express, Nike, Google, Goldman Sachs, NASA and Apple. Annual membership starts at $5,800 for women at the vice president level and $7,900 for C-suite executives. About 70% of members are sponsored by their employers.

With backing from Alphabet’s venture arm and a business model that relies on subscription to its digital platform, it’s more sustainable than a real-estate-focused business like The Wing, which was forced to close its doors over the summer.

The platform has a massive waitlist of 60,000 people, but Childers and Kaplan say they should be able to start vetting applicants more quickly now that the company has additional money to hire people and build out the technology.

Less ‘pantsuits and bad cheese plates’

Kaplan briefly worried about a dusty rose art piece at the center of the main San Francisco clubhouse room. “We might have to change that,” she remarked. “It’s kind of pink. I just don’t want it to be like ’this a space for women and this is pink.'”

“So often, executive spaces for women look like a space full of pantsuits and bad cheese plates in the corner but we’re in a moment where we can redefine what it looks like,” she added.

A large open floor plan with leather couches and chairs and high ceilings with bookshelves makes it feel more like a living room for casual, serendipitous interactions, members said.

Bathrooms have brushed gold finishes on faucets and around mirrors. Marble countertops lie under Chief-branded disposable towels by each sink while low-volume music plays overhead. The bar features a mid-century modern design with wooden paneling and a large chandelier made of hundreds of glasses.

The space has several “phone booths” with ring lights built in for Zoom meetings. A room on the other side of the main space is much lighter with eggshell-colored walls, a grand piano, and plush white lounge chairs that appear like furniture from a spa.

“There’s a relaxed atmosphere, no competition,” Coleman said. “We’re just finding ways to support one another.”

“It’s a beautiful space to accompany this feeling that things are profoundly changing,” Jaques said. “Being able to walk and have a new space that you feel welcomed in and meeting other women is going to be incredible and it just feels like there’s no going back to what was before.”

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Reddit challenges Australia’s under-16 social media ban in High Court filing, says law curbs political speech

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December 12, 2025

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Reddit challenges Australia’s under-16 social media ban in High Court filing, says law curbs political speech

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Reddit, the popular community-focused forum, has launched a legal challenge against Australia’s social media ban for teens under 16, arguing that the newly enacted law is ineffective and goes too far by restricting political discussion online.

In its application to Australia’s High Court, the social news and aggregation platform said the law is “invalid on the basis of the implied freedom of political communication”, saying that it burdens political communication.

Canberra’s ban came into effect on Wednesday and targeted 10 major services, including Alphabet‘s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram, ByteDance’s TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat and Elon Musk’s X. All targeted platforms had agreed to comply with the policy to varying degrees.

Australia’s Prime Minister’s office, Attorney-General’s Department and other social media platforms did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Under the law, the targeted platforms will have to take “reasonable steps” to prevent underage access, using age–verification methods such as inference from online activity, facial estimation via selfies, uploaded IDs, or linked bank details.

Reddit’s application to the courts seeks to either declare the law invalid or exclude the platform from the provisions of the law.

In a statement to CNBC, Reddit said that while it agrees with the importance of protecting persons under 16, the law could isolate teens “from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions).”

It also said in its application that the law “burdens political communication,” saying “the political views of children inform the electoral choices of many current electors, including their parents and their teachers, as well as others interested in the views of those soon to reach the age of maturity.”

The platform also argued that it should not be subject to the law, saying it operates more as a forum for adults facilitating “knowledge sharing” between users than as a traditional social network, saying that it does not import contact lists or address books.

“Reddit is significantly different from other sites that allow for users to become “friends” with one another, or to post photos about themselves, or to organise events,” the platform said in its application.

Reddit further said in its court filing that most content on its platform is accessible without an account, and pointed out a person under the age of 16 “can be more easily protected from online harm if they have an account, being the very thing that is prohibited.”

“That is because the account can be subject to settings that limit their access to particular kinds of content that may be harmful to them,” it adds.

Despite its objections, Reddit said that the challenge was not an attempt to avoid complying with the law, nor was it an effort to retain young users for business reasons.

“There are more targeted, privacy-preserving measures to protect young people online without resorting to blanket bans,” the platform said.

— CNBC’s Dylan Butts contributed to this story.

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Altman and Musk launched OpenAI as a nonprofit 10 years ago. Now they’re rivals in a trillion-dollar market

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December 12, 2025

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Altman and Musk launched OpenAI as a nonprofit 10 years ago. Now they’re rivals in a trillion-dollar market

Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during a talk session with SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son at an event titled “Transforming Business through AI” in Tokyo, Japan, on February 03, 2025.

Tomohiro Ohsumi | Getty Images

On Dec. 11, 2015, OpenAI launched as a nonprofit research lab after Elon Musk and a group of prominent techies, including Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, pledged $1 billion to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. The idea was for the project to be be free of commercial pressures and the pursuit of money.

A decade later, that founding mission is all but forgotten.

Musk, now the world’s richest person, is long gone, having created rival startup xAI. And he’s been engaged in a heated legal and public relations fight with OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman.

Far from the nonprofit realm, OpenAI has emerged as one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet, zooming to a $500 billion private market valuation, with almost all of that value accruing since the company’s launch of ChatGPT three years ago. More than 800 million people now use the chatbot every week.

Musk’s xAI, meanwhile, is expected to close a $15 billion round at a $230 billion pre-money valuation this month, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s David Faber in late November.

OpenAI and xAI are two of the main companies, along with Google, Anthropic and Meta, pouring money into AI models, as the market rapidly evolves from text-based chatbots to AI-generated videos and more advanced compute-intensive forms of content, as well as into agentic AI, with large enterprises customizing tools to enhance productivity.

For OpenAI, the price tag is almost incomprehensible: $1.4 trillion and growing. That’s primarily for the mammoth data centers and high-powered chips required to meet what the company sees as insatiable demand for its technology. For now, OpenAI is a cash-burning machine going up against tech’s megacaps and their chip suppliers, drawing comparisons to earlier waves of high-growth tech firms that spent heavily for years to challenge behemoth incumbents, but to mixed results.

“OpenAI has a very big role in the in the history of the development of artificial intelligence, and will forever have that role,” said Gil Luria, an equity analyst at D.A. Davidson, in an interview. “Now, will that role be Netscape, or will it be Google? We’ve yet to find out.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks at an event ahead of the COMPUTEX forum, in Taipei, Taiwan, June 2, 2024.

Ann Wang | Reuters

It’s a position that would’ve been hard to imagine in 2016, when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hauled a black DGX-1 supercomputer up to OpenAI’s offices in San Francisco’s Mission District. The $300,000 machine had cost Nvidia “a few billion dollars” to develop, and there were no other buyers, Huang recalled recently on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Musk, at OpenAI, was the only one who wanted it.

When Musk told him it was for “a nonprofit company,” Huang said all the blood drained from his face at the thought of parking such a costly box inside an organization that wasn’t meant to make money.

Behind the scenes, though, the nonprofit ideal was already under intense strain, and Musk didn’t like what he saw.

“Guys, I’ve had enough. This is the final straw,” Musk wrote in an email to his co-founders in 2017. He warned that he would “no longer fund OpenAI” if it turned into a tech startup instead of a nonprofit. Altman wrote back the next morning: “i remain enthusiastic about the non-profit structure!”

Altman vs. Musk

In February of the following year, Musk left the OpenAI board, and said at the time the move was to avoid a potential conflict of interest as his car company, Tesla, dove deeper into AI.

The story was more complicated.

Musk sued OpenAI and Altman in early 2024, alleging they abandoned the company’s founding mission to develop AI “for the benefit of humanity broadly,” and he’s regularly criticized OpenAI’s close ties to Microsoft, its principal backer. He also went to court to try and keep OpenAI from converting into a for-profit entity and, earlier this year, went so far as to try and acquire the AI lab for $97.4 billion.

In October, OpenAI announced it had completed a recapitalization, cementing its structure as a nonprofit with a controlling stake in its for-profit business, which is now a public benefit corporation called OpenAI Group PBC.

OpenAI signs $38B deal with Amazon: Here's what to know

Musk isn’t the only early OpenAI team member who’s turned into a bitter rival. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI in late 2020 to form Anthropic, which said last month that Microsoft and Nvidia would invest in the company. The valuation from the funding round could reach as high as $350 billion.

Anthropic’s Claude family of large language models is one of the biggest competitors to OpenAI’s GPT models.

Altman is wagering that he can win the race by outspending the competition. While his company has sketched out plans for a trillion-dollar-plus AI infrastructure outlay, Anthropic has made roughly $100 billion in recent compute commitments, spaced out at various intervals over the next few years.

It all amounts to a giant bet that demand for AI services will continue apace.

“We’ve got all the various AI vendors making these huge capital investments,” said David Menninger, executive director of software research at ISG. “There’s a question as to how long those capital investments continue and whether or not they all pan out.”

Luria says Anthropic and others are making reasonable commitments based on their current growth trajectory and the funding they’ve already secured. But he said OpenAI’s approach has been based on a “fantastical set of commitments” with a “faint belief that those numbers are even possible.”

‘Pretty extreme’

Altman told CNBC in an interview on Thursday that OpenAI is already seeing enough demand to justify its spending plans, which “makes us confident that we will be able to significantly ramp revenue.”

“It’s obviously unusual to be growing this fast at this kind of scale, but it is what we see in our current data,” Altman said, adding that “the demand in the market is pretty extreme.”

Altman said last month that he expects annualized revenue to hit $20 billion by the end of this year and to reach hundreds of billions by 2030. Its historic pace of growth has been a big boon for major tech companies.

Oracle signed a roughly $500 billion deal to sell infrastructure services to OpenAI over five years. Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom have woven OpenAI-linked demand into multi-year forecasts.

But Oracle’s shares plunged 11% on Thursday after the software vendor reported weaker-than-expected revenue, a miss that dragged down Nvidia, CoreWeave and other AI-related stocks. Despite a surge in long-term contract commitments from companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Nvidia, investors are growing concerned about Oracle’s debt load that’s fueling its buildout.

Oracle plunges on weak revenue

Still, venture capitalist Matt Murphy of Menlo Ventures, said that in his 25 years in the venture business, “this is the mother of all waves.”

Murphy, an early investor in Anthropic, said the combination of AI models, custom chips and hyperscale data centers adds up to the potential for trillion-dollar outcomes. That explains the eye-popping level of capital expenditures and the astronomical valuations, he said.

Altman recently declared a “code red” inside his company, and shuffled resources to focus on making ChatGPT faster, more reliable and more personal, while delaying work on ads, health and shopping agents and a personal assistant called Pulse. His declaration came after Google released its Gemini 3 model last month, further accelerating the search giant’s ascent in the market.

On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT-5.2, a faster, more capable reasoning model that the company says is its best system yet for everyday professional use. It also struck a three-year, $1 billion content and equity deal with Disney around the Sora AI video generator.

Altman downplayed the threat from Google, telling CNBC that Gemini had less of an impact on the company’s metrics than OpenAI initially feared.

“I believe that when a competitive threat happens, you want to focus on it, deal with it quickly,” Altman said.

He said he expects the company to exit code red by January.

— CNBC’s Kif Leswing contributed to this report.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: Expect annualized revenue run rate to top $20B this year

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Broadcom stock reverses lower on a misinterpretation of what the CEO said on the earnings call

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December 12, 2025

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Broadcom stock reverses lower on a misinterpretation of what the CEO said on the earnings call

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