Women's Summit
2026

Mira Murati did not want Mark Zuckerberg's money. The Albanian-American tech entrepreneur turned down a billion US$ from the Meta founder.

Murati was CTO at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024 and left the company to found her own AI start-up, Thinking Machines Lab, last year. Zuckerberg wanted to acquire it for the Meta group and offered US$ 1 billion for the takeover. Murati declined. And her employees, whom the Meta founder then tried to poach, also remained loyal to Murati. One of the reasons: The company is working unwaveringly towards its goal of making AI models accessible to everyone and creating space for fundamental scientific development. This vision was priceless. One year after its founding, Thinking Machines Lab was worth twelve times Zuckerberg's offer.

What does this example tell us about determination and assertiveness, about resilience and intelligence, migration and diversity, about power and influence, and the mechanisms behind them? And how relevant are they to careers, or, as in Murati's case, leaders with attitude? What can we learn from this woman?

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Heidi Aichinger, Publisher