Altman has claimed before that he doesn't hold equity in OpenAI. He could have some kind of more opaque arrangement that gives him a material stake in the financial success of OpenAI, and downplayed it or didn't disclose it to the board.
Who knows, though -- I'm sure we'll find out more in the next few weeks, but it's fun to guess.
Yeah that's my guess too. The claim that he doesn't hold equity always struck me as suspect. It's a little like SBF driving around in the Toyota Corolla while buying tens of millions of dollars of real estate for himself and his family.
It's better to claim your stake in a forthright way, than to have some kind of lucrative side deal, off the books.
For a non-profit, there was too much secrecy about the company structure (the shift to being closed rather than Open), the source of training data, and the financial arrangements with Microsoft. And a few years ago a whole bunch of employees left to start a different company/non-profit, etc.
It feels like a ton of stuff was simmering below the surface.
(I should add that I have no idea why someone who was wealthy before OpenAI would want to do such a thing, but it's the only reason I can imagine for this abrupt firing. There are staggering amounts of money at play, so there's room for portions of it to be un-noticed.)
In recent profile, it was stated that he jokes in private about becoming the first trillionaire, which doesnt seem to reconcile with the public persona he sought to craft. Reminds me of Zuckerberg proclaiming he would bring the world together while calling users fucking dumbshits in private chats.
Oh wow, he's also an effective altruist?! Didn't know that. It's so bad. My take is that there's nothing more hypocritical, and therefore, arguably, more evil than this.
Yeah, although I guess you can read that as: "I will do everything I can to raise the stock price, which executives and employees both hold", then it actually makes sense.
But that $1 salary thing got quoted into a meme, and people didn't understand the true implication.
The idea is that employee and CEO incentives should be aligned -- they are part of a team. If Jobs actually had NO equity like Altman claims, then that wouldn't be the case! Which is why it's important for everyone to be clear about their stake.
It's definitely possible for CEOs to steal from employees. There are actually corporate raiders, and Jobs wasn't one of them.
(Of course he's no saint, and did a bunch of other sketchy things, like collusion to hold down employee salaries, and financial fraud:
The SEC's complaint focuses on the backdating of two large option grants, one of 4.8 million shares for Apple's executive team and the other of 7.5 million shares for Steve Jobs.)
I have no idea what happened in Altman's case. Now I think there may not be any smoking gun, but just an accumulation of all these "curious" and opaque decisions and outcomes. Basically a continuation of all the stuff that led a whole bunch of people to leave a few years ago.
> It's definitely possible for CEOs to steal from employees..
I'm pretty sure that CEO salaries across the board means that CEO's are definitely — in their own way — "stealing" from the employees. Certainly one of those groups is over-compensated, and the other, in general, is not.
What I meant is that there are corporate raids of declining/old companies like Sears and K-Mart. Nobody wants to run these companies on their way down, so opportunistic people come along, promise the board the world, cause a lot of chaos, find loopholes to enrich themselves -- then leave the company in a worse state than when they joined.
Apple was a declining company when Jobs came back the second time. He also managed to get the ENTIRE board fired, IIRC. He created a new board of his own choosing.
So in theory he could have raided the company for its assets, but that's obviously not what happened.
By taking $1 salary, he's saying that he intends to build the company's public value in the long term, not just take its remaining cash in the short term. That's not what happens at many declining companies. The new leaders don't always intend to turn the company around.
So in those cases I'd say the CEO is stealing from shareholders, and employees are often shareholders.
On the other hand, I don't really understand Altman's compensation. I'm not sure I would WANT to work under a CEO that has literally ZERO stake in the company. There has to be more to the story.
> I don't really understand Altman's compensation. I'm not sure I would WANT to work under a CEO that has literally ZERO stake in the company.
This is a non-profit not a company. The board values the mission over the stock price of their for-profit subsidiary.
Having a CEO who does not own equity helps make sure that the non-profit mission remains the CEOs top priority. In this case though, perhaps that was not enough.
Could be that they had an expectation that he not own stock in MSFT since they have such a direct relationship there and found out that he has been holding shares in MSFT.
You have to understand that OpenAI was never going to be anything more than the profit limited generator of the change. It’s the lamb. Owning a stake in OpenAI isn’t important. Creating the change is.
Owning stakes in the companies that will ultimately capture and harvest the profits of the disruption caused by OpenAI (and they’re ilk) is.
OpenAI can’t become a profit center while it disrupts all intellectual work and digitizes humanities future: those optics are not something you want to be attached to. There is no flame retardant suite strong enough.
Worldcoin is scanning people’s irises by having them look into a sphere called a fucking Orb so it can automatically create crypto wallets and distribute global minimum basic incomes after the AI apocalypse.
Altman conceived and raised $115 million for the company.
I could easily see him, or any other insider, setting themselves up administrating a recipient entity for contributions out of those “capped profits” the parent non-profit is supposed to distribute. (If, of course, the company ever becomes profitable at the scale where the cap kicks in.)
Seems like it would be a great way to eventually maintain control over your own little empire while also obfuscating its structure and dodging some of the scrutiny that SV executives have attracted during the past decade. Originally meant as a magnanimous PR gesture, but will probably end up being taught as a particularly messy example of corporate governance in business schools.
Yeah, I agree that the whole legal structure is basically duplicitous, and any attempt to cite it as some evidence of virtue is more emblematic of the opposite...
Who knows, though -- I'm sure we'll find out more in the next few weeks, but it's fun to guess.