The Doomed mission behind Sam Altman's shock ouster from OpenAI
Healthy companies led by competent, commercially successful and globally beloved founders generally don't tend to fire them. And, as Sam Altman walked on stage in San Francisco on Nov. 6, all those things could have described his role at OpenAI.
The co-founder and chief executive officer had kicked off a global race for artificial intelligence supremacy, helped OpenAI surpass much larger competitors, and was, by this point, regularly compared to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Eleven days later he would be fired — kicking off a chaotic weekend during which executives and investors loyal to Altman were agitating for his return. The board ignored them, and hired Emmett Shear, the former Twitch CEO, instead.
On Nov. 6, at the company's first developer conference, the acclaim for Altman seemed universal. Attendees applauded rapturously as he ticked off the company's accomplishments: 2 million customers, including “over 92% of Fortune 500 companies.” A big reason for that was Microsoft Corp., which invested $13 billion into the company and put Altman at the center of a corporate overhaul that has caused it to leapfrog rivals like Google and Amazon in certain categories of cloud computing, reinvigorated its Bing search engine, and put the company in the leading position in the hottest software category. Now, Altman invited CEO Satya Nadella onto the stage and asked him how Microsoft felt about the partnership. Nadella started to respond, and then broke into laughter, as if the answer to the question was absurdly obvious. “We love you guys,” he finally said after he'd calmed down. He thanked Altman for “building something magical.”
But if customers and investors were happy, there was one constituency that remained deeply skeptical
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