Updated at 8:41 a.m. ET on November 22, 2023
Five days after Sam Altman’s shocking dismissal from OpenAI and many twists later, the company has announced that he will, in fact, return as CEO. The company’s board of directors, at the core of the drama, is being overhauled. The dust finally appears to be settling.
In the days after his firing, Altman managed to prove that he is far more than a figurehead, winning over a majority of OpenAI employees (including Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and the reported architect of his dismissal—it’s, uh, complicated) and some of the tech industry’s biggest luminaries. A number of OpenAI’s most powerful investors rallied around him. On X (formerly Twitter) this weekend, legions of OpenAI employees signaled their loyalty to him “I am Spartacus!”–style; Altman responded with a flurry of heart emoji. Getting unexpectedly fired in front of a global audience is assuredly stressful, but one gets the sense that it also amounted to a huge ego flex for the 38-year-old tech executive. You can see it in the weekend’s most indelible image: a selfie tweeted by Altman on Sunday as he visited OpenAI’s San Francisco offices to continue negotiations, lips pursed in mock disgust, a visitor’s lanyard clutched in his hand. “First and last time i ever wear one of these,” he wrote.” Altman was having fun. He was winning.
This is the triumph of a Bay Area operator and dealmaker over OpenAI’s charter, which purports to place the betterment of humanity above profit and personality. It’s a similar story for Microsoft and its CEO, Satya Nadella, who have invested billions in OpenAI and were reportedly blindsided by Altman’s firing. Quickly, the company used its investment in OpenAI, much of which is reportedly in the form of computing power instead of cash, as leverage to reopen negotiations. Nadella also extended an offer for Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman to start a new AI-research group there, creating a win-win situation for the tech giant: Regardless of what happened to OpenAI, Microsoft would have kept the access it currently has to the company’s data and intellectual property, or it could have subsumed the company altogether. Clearly, this was a favorable situation for Altman: He would either return to OpenAI or continue his work with Microsoft’s full backing. Either way, he wouldn’t be wearing the guest pass again.
From all of this, one thing seems abundantly clear: The money always wins.
As my colleague Karen Hao and I reported over the weekend, the central tension coursing through OpenAI in the past year was whether the company should commercialize, raise money, and grow to further its ambitions of building an artificial general intelligence—a technology so powerful that it could outperform humans in most tasks—or whether it ought to focus its efforts on the safety of its potentially dangerous innovations. Altman represented the former faction, and his aggressive business decisions appear to have been a key factor in his dismissal.
After the shock of Altman’s firing subsided, I noticed a sense of admiration from some industry observers toward OpenAI’s board. Yes, the decision to sack the CEO was brazen and badly messaged, and the implications for the company and its investments may have been poorly thought out. But it was principled, an indication that OpenAI’s nonprofit corporate structure was working exactly as intended to protect the fate of the company’s technology from the whims of one leader. “Somebody finally held the tech bros accountable!” a tech executive texted me on Saturday morning. A former social-media executive proposed a tantalizing counterfactual to me: What if Facebook had been able to fire CEO Mark Zuckerberg before the turmoil of the 2016 election? What would the world look like now?
Altman may have been a true believer in OpenAI’s charter. But he’s also a true believer in scale and profit. His tenure as CEO was partly an argument that, to change the world with your technology, you need the money to build it and the ability to get others to invest in it. If Sutskever was the visionary of OpenAI, Altman was seemingly the person who could sell it to people. And it is Altman who reportedly leveraged his business relationships to put immense pressure on OpenAI’s board. He didn’t call OpenAI’s bluff over the weekend: Instead, he demonstrated what the company might look like without its multibillion-dollar corporate investments and without its money man. According to Bloomberg, that future included some investors potentially writing down the value of their OpenAI holdings to nothing. Now Altman’s back, seemingly more powerful than before.
It remains unclear why he was fired in the first place, and we don’t know exactly how OpenAI’s new board will govern the company. A cynical person might argue that, had he gone to Microsoft, Altman would no longer need to maintain the pretense of answering first to humanity—as an employee of one of the world’s biggest technology companies, his primary obligation would have been fiduciary. He would answer to Nadella and to shareholders. But no matter how noble Altman’s intentions are, any moral leanings he might have ultimately mean very little to the money, which, regardless of where he lands, will continue to flow toward Microsoft and toward whatever products Altman and his team build.
Silicon Valley is peerless when it comes to mythologizing its ideas men (and yes, they tend to be men). In the industry’s telling, technologies and their founders succeed in a meritocratic fashion, based on the genius of the idea and the skill of its execution. OpenAI’s self-mythologizing went a step further, positioning itself almost in opposition to its own industry—a company so committed to an ideology and a purity of product that it would self-immolate to protect itself and others. Over the weekend, this ideology crashed against the rocks of a capitalist reality. As is always true in Silicon Valley, a great idea can get you only so far. It’s the money that gets you over the finish line.
This story has been updated throughout to reflect the news after publication that Sam Altman was reinstated as the CEO of OpenAI.