Sam Altman has dismissed longtime rival Elon Musk’s warnings that OpenAI is set to dominate Microsoft, after the companies announced that OpenAI’s latest AI model will be incorporated into Microsoft products.

On Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that OpenAI’s GPT-5 service would be launching across platforms including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Azure AI Foundry — prompting a response from Musk that “OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive.”

Nadella sought to downplay the issue. “People have been trying for 50 years and that’s the fun of it! Each day you learn something new, and innovate, partner, and compete,” he said on X, also expressing excitement for Musk’s own Grok 4 chatbot, which is available on Azure on a limited preview.

OpenAI CEO Altman shared his own repartee on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Friday, saying, when asked of Musk’s input, “You know, I don’t think about him that much.”

He went on to question the meaning of Musk’s statements, also noting of the tech billionaire, “I thought he was just, like, tweeting all day [on X] about how much OpenAI sucks, and our model is bad, and, you know, [we’re] not gonna be a good company and all that.”

CNBC has reached out to Musk-owned X for comment.

Altman and Musk have frequently exchanged barbs as part of a long-storied feud that dates back to their disagreement over the ultimate mission of OpenAI, which they co-founded in 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab.

OpenAI has since been seeking to convert into a for-profit entity and capitalize on meteoric demand for its viral ChatGPT product, with Microsoft stepping in as a top backer. Musk previously filed — and has since dropped — a lawsuit against the company, citing breach of contract.

Earlier this year, the Tesla boss also led a consortium that offered to acquire the nonprofit that controls OpenAI for $97.4 billion. Altman declined the proposal with a curt “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want” on social media. He separately told CNBC at the time that he thought the takeover offer was an effort to “slow down a competitor.”

LONDON — Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey told CNBC there hasn’t been a “falling out” with the U.K. government over delays to fintech giant Revolut’s long-awaited bank license.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that a meeting arranged by British Finance Minister Rachel Reeves with Revolut and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) — an arm of the BOE that oversees banks — was cancelled after an intervention from Bailey.

Authorizing Revolut as a fully licensed bank has become an important issue for the U.K. government, particularly as key figures in the tech industry have challenged tax changes that affect the wealthy.

However, in an interview with CNBC’s Ritika Gupta on Thursday, Bailey denied any suggestion that relations between the BOE and Treasury had soured over delays to Revolut’s bank license approval process.

“There’s been no falling out between [Reeves] and I on this, or indeed on anything,” he said. “Actually, we have very good relations, and I think both the Bank and the Treasury have made that clear.”

Bailey added that while he couldn’t comment too much on Revolut specifically, the Prudential Regulation Authority is working things through with the digital banking startup during its “mobilization” process.

The fintech giant was granted a banking license with restrictions in July 2024 from the U.K.’s PRA, bringing an end to a years-long application process that began back in 2021.

This key victory moved Revolut into what’s known as the “mobilization” phase of a company’s journey toward becoming a full-fledged bank.

During this period, firms are limited to holding only £50,000 of total customer deposits — well below the hundreds of billions of pounds customers deposit with major high street lenders such as Barclays, HSBC and Santander.

Revolut customers in the U.K. are also still served by the company’s e-money unit, instead of its banking entity. This means they are not directly insured by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which protects customers up to £85,000 if a firm fails.

Delays to Revolut have been a point of contention for the government, which has come under fire from the U.K. tech industry for not doing enough to ensure the country can compete effectively with the U.S. and other key hubs.

Bailey stressed that there was “no trade off between financial stability and growth in the economy.” However, he suggested that he was open to rule changes to enable the fintech sector to flourish.

“We are very open to making changes where they’re appropriate,” he said.

When venture capitalist Keith Rabois got into e-commerce, he couldn’t stop buying brands. Now, everything must go.

OpenStore, co-founded by Rabois in 2021, is shutting down nearly all of the 40-plus Shopify stores it acquired, and it’s in the process of liquidating any remaining inventory by offering steep discounts to move merchandise.

Earlier this week, the company announced it plans to focus solely on growing Jack Archer, the menswear brand it bought for $837,000 in 2022. The website address open.store now redirects to jackarcher.com.

The dramatic downsizing to a single brand comes as OpenStore in recent weeks raised a $15 million funding round that valued the company at just $50 million, a fraction of its previous $1 billion valuation, CNBC has confirmed. Bloomberg previously reported on the financing round and some of the reorganization details.

OpenStore’s existing backers include General Catalyst, Lux Capital and Khosla Ventures, where Rabois is a managing director. Rabois didn’t respond to requests for comment.

It marks the latest example of the decaying e-commerce aggregator market. Companies in the space took advantage of low interest rates and pandemic-driven growth in online retail to collectively raise more than $16 billion from top names on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley with the intent of rolling up independent sellers on marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify.

Rabois was the No. 1 cheerleader on social media and elsewhere, touting the startup and its Miami headquarters. He posted on Twitter (now X) in April 2021, the “best talent i have ever worked with is joining Openstore.” About a year later, Business Insider quoted Rabois in a story saying, “We can absolutely handle acquiring a business in a day,” and that “I eventually want to get to one an hour, but that is definitely a challenge.”

As recently as June 2024, Rabois shared a post from the company and wrote, “We’re hiring! Come learn about the future of commerce online.”

By that point, the broader aggregator market was in free fall. Cracks had begun to appear in 2022 as venture funding dried up for cash-burning startups and e-commerce demand cooled with consumers returning to physical stores. Many aggregators struggled to run the brands they acquired profitably, and began selling off assets or merging with rivals to stay afloat.

Top aggregator Thrasio filed for bankruptcy and laid off staffers in early 2024. Unybrands, backed heavily by Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, also cut jobs around the same time.

OpenStore rolled up dozens of Shopify stores offering an assortment of hairbrushes, neck pillows, fine jewelry, skin wands and other goods.

By last year, the business had come under significant pressure. It was becoming increasingly difficult and expensive for some of OpenStore’s brands to attract and retain customers.

Last August, the company tapped the brakes on new acquisitions, and cut jobs across the company, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because of confidentiality.

Jack Archer and a selection of other brands, like Future Kind supplements, Sweat Tent portable saunas and EXO Drones, were viewed as standouts. But many of OpenStore’s other products failed to grow their sales, while they required costly digital marketing campaigns and new product development that burned through cash, the people said.

By the beginning of this year, employees in OpenStore’s supply chain division were putting together a liquidation list, said one person involved. The first step was to turn off the brand’s Shopify store, then either sell remaining inventory at a discount or donate it, they added.

“It was just way too many different brands to make them all work the way Jack Archer did,” the person said.

As part of the restructuring, OpenStore laid off more employees in June, the people said. Among the teams that were impacted was a group working on an automated customer support service, called OpenDesk, they said.

Several top executives have also departed the company, including OpenStore co-founder and tech chief Jeremy Wood and Trenton Riggs, the company’s president.

When OpenStore was getting started and scaling, some investors with limited domain expertise in e-commerce were attracted to the opportunity because of Rabois’ long history in startups and venture capital, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named in order to discuss private information. They were less enticed by the business of rolling up small online retailers, the person said.

Before his career in venture at Khosla and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Rabois had key roles at Square, LinkedIn and as part of the so-called PayPal mafia, and he made notable angel investments in companies including YouTube, Airbnb and Palantir.

Rabois, who served as OpenStore’s CEO, won’t be involved in Jack Archer’s day-to-day leadership. He will remain on the company’s board, another person familiar with the matter said. The person asked not to be named in order to discuss private information.

Last month, the company named Emma Crepeau, previously growth chief at apparel company Rhone, to be Jack Archer’s CEO as it enters the “next chapter of growth.” Jack Archer, which has seen triple-digit net sales growth year to date and “strong” customer repeat rates, plans to relaunch its brand in the fourth quarter, the person said.

“We’re doubling down on what matters most: purpose-built design, modern essentials, and a community of men redefining what style can look and feel like,” the company wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Emma’s leadership will be a key part of that evolution.”

As for Rabois’ current view, he’s still finding a way to promote the company. In response to comments on X about some of the latest developments, he wrote last month, “Not a failure — 10x focus on what is anomalously great.”

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed reporting to this story.