In 2026, OpenAI closed a deal that could end the race for who controls the future of AI.

This deal was for a man who shaped the future of AI as we know it…

But this same deal could have been closed by any of their competitors…

And the reason it wasn’t is because of a hidden formula they all missed that could make you a millionaire.

And to discover all the secrets behind OpenAI’s deal, I break them all down in episode 3 of my new show, Billion Dollar Deals.

So here are the secrets behind OpenAI’s deal that you can use to become rich…

In January of 2026, a single person changed the AI world forever.

From his home in Vienna, Peter Steinberger made a prototype of an AI assistant called Clawdbot.

But we all know it today as OpenClaw.

The project was:

Attracting millions of visitors on GitHub.
People were suddenly rushing to buy Mac Minis
And the success of OpenClaw got the attention of the biggest AI firms on the planet

This was the Star Trek moment.

Which meant that the future of technology was here… The world would never be the same again.

But to understand why this deal happened, we need to go back to when ChatGPT hit the market.

ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022 and 100 million people signed up in two months…

But OpenAI wasn’t the only tech giant doing AI research…

In fact, there were 3 other big companies working on AI:

Google
Anthropic
And xAI

Every single one of these four AI giants was building the exact same thing:

An AI-powered chatbot.

At first, ChatGPT was the clear leader in the AI race. They had nearly 87% of the market.

But the gap started to close…

Claude, Gemini, and Grok all continued to get more powerful as time passed.

So OpenAI’s head start from eighteen months ago was becoming an all-out sprint to figure out who had the best model.

But while the headlines were busy talking about who was winning the war for the best chatbot, they missed something critical…

In Europe, Peter Steinberger had been following the AI race closely from his home in Vienna.

And he saw an opportunity to introduce the next stage of AI.

The era of Agentic AI.

In November of 2025, Steinberger released the world’s first AI agent.

But here’s the thing:

OpenClaw also threatened every AI company’s entire business model.

And this made OpenClaw the AI agent breakthrough they all wanted, and it was all thanks to a single person.

But while all of this unfolded, OpenAI was plotting their next move. Because AI agents would give them a product nobody else had.

Which means they wouldn’t be competing on who could make the better chatbot…

Rather, who could reach Agentic AI the fastest.

But here’s the thing:

Steinberger never wanted to sell OpenClaw.

He had made it an open-source product that anyone could use.

And so now OpenAI had 2 choices:

They could either let this opportunity slip through their fingers
Or find a better way to make this deal happen

In February of 2026, OpenAI closed a deal with Steinberger.

OpenAI was able to put together a deal that would allow OpenClaw to operate as an open-source project on its own with OpenAI’s support.

This means OpenClaw would stay public…

But the person behind it was now working for them.

And for Peter Steinberger, this deal would get him closer to his goal of bringing AI agents to everyone.

But for this deal to work, price was not going to be the only factor.

And to understand why, we need to use the 3rd part of my Deal DNA: Price and Terms.

The price is what the headlines talk about. But the terms are the hidden layers of the deal they don’t talk about.

And in this deal, we have 3 layers.

Layer 1 is the acqui-hire of Peter Steinberger.

This is when a bigger company buys a small company or startup to get the main person who runs it.

But the Aqui-hire of Peter Steinberger was far from your typical deal because OpenAI didn’t actually buy OpenClaw.

This is because Steinberger made OpenClaw staying open-source a non-negotiable for his hiring.

Layer 2 is that Steinberger would work for OpenAI on a salary and lead the development of their AI agent program.

And finally, layer 3 is the overall valuation of this deal, which is an estimated

$2-$15 million.

And so most of the value from this deal comes from Peter Steinberger’s knowledge and ability to build AI agents.

But if Steinberger leaves, OpenAI loses one of its biggest advantages in the AI race.

This is why the deal only works if OpenAI can keep Steinberger long enough to transfer his knowledge and help build the next generation of agents.

And to understand how they created a deal that could make him want to stay, we need to use the final part of my Deal DNA: the X-factor.

Because here’s the truth:

Any major AI company could have executed an acqui-hire for Steinberger.

In fact, he could be working for Meta right now.

But the reason he’s not is that OpenAI saw and closed this opportunity before anyone else could…

So how did they do this?

It’s a 4-step formula that I’ve reverse-engineered from this deal, and have personally seen it create millionaires…

I call it the Speed Formula.

And once you understand it, you can apply it to anything in life.

Here’s how it works:

You need to identify an opportunity in your market.

This could be a gap in your market:

A new technology like AI
A business problem that nobody is solving
Or a combination of skills that not many people have like Peter Steinberger has

Your plan is how you bring the opportunity to life.

You’re mapping out the series of steps you need to reach the goal.

So start by asking yourself two things:

What would need to be true for this opportunity to work for me?

What are the steps that will get me there?

And only when you have your answers to these questions… can you move to step three…

Action is executing on your plan with speed.

This is how you bring the opportunity to life.

Action is doing all of the things that you’ve outlined in your plan.

But we know that not everything goes according to plan…

So when the situation changes, you don’t need to change the goal… you just need to change the plan.

But action is where nearly everyone goes wrong…

Because just like OpenAI’s competitors, they wait too long.

And this is where the final step comes into play…

Time.

A rough plan with speed will always get you much further than building the perfect plan for days or weeks.

Because the longer you wait, the more opportunity you give your competitors.

The people who actually build wealth know that speed is the shortest distance between seeing and acting on an opportunity.

This is why they compress the time between opportunity, plan, and action better than 99% of people.

This speed formula is exactly what gets you ahead.

And it’s one of the most common patterns I’ve seen that millionaires share.

So OpenAI’s deal shows you that the real value is in these two things:

Seeing something before everyone else catches on
And taking massive action

Because they:

Saw an opportunity.
Built a plan around it.
Took action.

And they compressed the time between seeing it and doing it.

This is how true wealth gets created…

Speed is king.

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