How OpenAI's Bizarre Structure Gave 4 People the Power to Fire Sam Altman

When Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other investors formed the startup behind ChatGPT as a US not-for-profit organization in 2015, Altman told Vanity Fair he had very little experience with nonprofits. "So I'm just not sure how it's going to go," he said. He couldn't have imagined the drama of this week, with four directors on OpenAI's nonprofit board unexpectedly firing him as CEO and removing the company's president as chairman of the board. But the bylaws Altman and his cofounders initially established and a restructuring in 2019 that opened the door to billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft gave a handful of people with no financial stake in the company the power to upend the project on a whim. An attempt to restore Altman as CEO and replace the board ran into difficulty Sunday over the role of existing directors in choosing their replacements, Bloomberg reported.