She is one of the most powerful women in tech.
She worked at Tesla, launched ChatGPT, and oversaw GPT-4.
Her biggest flex? She refused billions from Mark Zuckerberg and built a $50 billion company instead.
This is the Mira Murati story:
She was the daughter of two teachers in Albania who pushed books, languages, and competition.
By her teens, she was winning math Olympiads.
At 16, she left for Canada on a scholarship.
By 23, dual degrees from Colby and Dartmouth.
And she was just getting started.
Then came the career moves that don't look linear until you see the pattern:
• Engineer at Zodiac Aerospace
• Senior Product Manager on Tesla's Model X
• VP of Product and Engineering at Leap Motion
Every job pushed her closer to the frontier of human-machine interaction.
At Tesla, she managed one of the company's most complex vehicles ever built.
Falcon-wing doors. Driver-assistance systems. Brutal development cycles under Elon Musk's expectations.
Three years of learning how to ship something beautiful and impossibly complicated.
In 2018, she joined OpenAI as VP of Applied AI and quietly expanded her control over research, product, and safety.
By 2022, she was CTO, the executive directly responsible for OpenAI's technical direction.
She oversaw the launch of ChatGPT, DALL·E, Codex, Sora, and GPT-4.
Then came November 2023.
The OpenAI board fired Sam Altman in a sudden crisis that shook the entire industry.
Murati stepped in as interim CEO.
For several chaotic days, she held together a company that was tearing itself apart.
But by September 2024, she was done.
She left OpenAI quietly and spent months talking to researchers and investors about what she felt was missing in AI.
Real transparency. More user control. Independence from tech giants.
In February 2025, she announced Thinking Machines Lab.
The company raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation before shipping a single product.
Her co-founders are all top OpenAI alumni: Schulman, Zoph, Weng, Tulloch, Metz.
Every one of them bet on her vision over the safety of a trillion-dollar company.
She structured it as a public benefit corporation.
Her voting power outweighs the rest of the board. No tech giant gets to override her direction.
The mission: "Build AI systems that are more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable."
That independence made Mark Zuckerberg nervous.
Meta, racing to build a superintelligence team, targeted more than a dozen of her engineers with packages reaching up to $1 billion each.
Not a single person took the offer.
By late 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was pursuing another $5 billion at a $50 billion valuation.
Meta threw billions at her team and barely made a dent.
That tells you everything about Mira Murati's gravitational pull.
Thanks for reading!
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